Mean Girls fans, raise your hands if you’re feeling personally victimized by this news: The original four stars were reportedly down to do another movie, but the offer they got from Paramount was allegedly “disrespectful.”
A “highly placed production source” has told Page Six that original Mean Girls stars Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, and Lacey Chabert have remained in touch and were willing to reunite for the new Mean Girls film being adapted for Paramount+.
The film will transport the Mean Girls Broadway musical to the screen, and Page Six reports that it’s not yet known in what capacity the actors would return. Alas, the source said, “Paramount Pictures doesn’t want to pay the girls what they are worth.”
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Production on the new Mean Girls will soon be underway, with writer Tina Fey recently telling Seth Meyers that filming would begin on March 6. According to Page Six, Fey was offered a seven-figure deal for starring in, writing, and producing the upcoming film. The one-time “Plastics,” meanwhile, were allegedly offered a “fraction” of that, and negotiations have reportedly “stalled.”
A second source who spoke with Page Six called the offer the actors received “disrespectful” whether they “appear in a cameo” or they “have six pages of script.”
Given Mean Girls’ enduring, extremely meme-able legacy, sequel conversations have been simmering for more than a decade. (A TV-movie sequel did already happen in 2011, but is that really the same?) The cast has also reunited from time to time, including a reunion in 2020 with Katie Couric that urged people to vote—but once again, that’s not quite the same.
Last year, Amanda Seyfried and Lindsay Lohan discussed the possibility of a sequel during a conversation with Interview magazine where Seyfried wondered aloud, “Mean Girls 2 is never going to happen, is it?” Lohan noted at the time that she’d heard about the movie-musical, “and I was like, ‘Oh no.’ We can’t do that. It has to be the same tone.”
Representatives for Lohan, McAdams, Seyfried, Chabert, and Paramount have not responded to The Daily Beast’s request for comment. A representative for Fey declined to comment.