Exit polls show Mean Girls audiences didn’t know it was a musical
Mean Girls toppled Wonka from the top of Australian box office over the weekend, but it seems that at least a quarter of those movie-goers might not have been expecting to have plot exposition sung at them for two straight hours.
For the uninitiated, the 2024 version of Mean Girls is a movie, based on the Broadway production of the original Mean Girls movie. So it’s a movie, based on a musical, based on a movie. A similar logic was used when Capcom released a game based on Street Fighter: The Movie, which was, of course, based on the game.
But it seems that knotty logic escaped a quarter of movie-goers. This is according to Paramount, who conducted exit polls after waves of criticism hit the internet (read: TikTok) as Mean Girls moviegoers didn’t realise they were in for a musical. Listen to the audible audience groan in the below video to see how violently the idea of an enforced musical rattles the bones of most sensible people.
@swagfreshboi Pain 😭 #meangirls #meangirls2024
According to Paramount’s exit polls, 75% of audiences “knew it was a musical before buying a ticket” – which suggests that a quarter did not. Paramount also shared that 16% left the theater “disappointed” by the film – a statistic they perhaps would have been wise to keep to themselves.
This is in the US, mind, but distain for musicals knows no geographical boundaries. 173,000 Aussies saw Mean Girls during its first four days, meaning 43,250 of these people didn’t expect to be danced at.
“I don’t think there was any surprise,” insists Paramount’s distribution chief Chris Aronson. “Audiences knew what they were getting into.”
Judging by his own statistics, audiences didn’t know what they were getting into.
A lot of the blame has to lie with the trailer. Throughout the two-minute trailer not a note is sung by any cast members, the word ‘musical’ isn’t used once, and a few frames of what can forensically be uncovered as ‘dance routines’ are spliced subliminally throughout.
Keep in mind that a key plot point in the original non-musical film was a high school musical in which the main characters performed in Santa outfits (which is shown in the trailer) and it adds another layer of confusion.
But who cares? The film was made on a relatively shoestring budget, just US$36 million (A$55m), of which it made back US$32 million (A$48.8m) within its first three days in the US alone. It is an unqualified success. Part of the reason for its modest budget is that it was commissioned to appear on Paramount+ before being elevated to a full cinema release.
Interestingly, Wonka is also a musical that was marketed without implicitly stating as much.
BoxOffice Pro chief analyst Shawn Robbins told Hollywood Reporter that such furtive tactics are common in Hollywood, pointing to recent musicals which tanked, and the 2013 success of Frozen, which was clearly a musical but never marketed as such.
“It’s become easy to oversimplify why musicals haven’t worked,” Robbins told the publication.
“The sample size that a lot of marketing teams are looking at recently are West Side Story and In the Heights, and there was a lot of baggage with those.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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