Fetch, or something like it, is officially happening. The first trailer for the Mean Girls movie musical has premiered, taking viewers on a ride down memory lane with a relatively new cast of characters.
The trailer is chock full of familiar faces, locales, and even outfits that come directly from Tina Fey‘s classic 2004 comedy Mean Girls. We open with Tim Meadows‘ Principal Duvall screaming “Hell no” as chaos ensues at North Shore High School; soon after, we see Fey’s math teacher, Ms. Norbury, wearing a blouse that’s almost identical to the one she wore almost 20 years ago as she chastises a student, telling them to “keep it PG-13.” The trailer is chock full of thinly veiled allusions and not so subtle references to the original film, including Cady (Angourie Rice) wearing the same blue plaid shirt her foremother Lindsay Lohan wore while traversing the halls of high school.
Despite all the similarities, the trailer warns that this is not your mother’s Mean Girls. Paramount’s remake is adapted not directly from the film but from the Tony-nominated Mean Girls Broadway musical, with a book by Fey, lyrics by Nell Benjamin, and music by Fey’s husband, Jonathan Richmond.
Yet besides a single eighth note placed in the middle of the “A” in the film’s title, there’s no indication that this Mean Girls movie is, in fact, a musical. Instead of including any original music from the film, the trailer is set to Olivia Rodrigo‘s pop-punk anthem “Get Him Back.”
Still, there’s plenty in the trailer to indicate that we’ve got a modernized Mean Girls on our hands. Along with iPhones and TikToks, we see Damian (Jaquel Spivey) and Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) find Cady eating lunch in the bathroom stall alone. “We’re concerned you’re either doing drugs or having a toilet baby,” quips Damian. During health and human sexuality class, Jon Hamm‘s creepy gym teacher Coach Carr tells his students, “We’ll be getting into abstinence, of course, then followed by in the spring condoms and choking;” behind him, we see “vazectomy” and “IUD” written on the white board. And Busy Phillips is also here, putting her own spin on cool mom Mrs. George, originally played by Amy Poehler.
Mean Girls purists will also notice plenty of moments that seem to be recreated whole cloth from the original film, which just burst back into culture thanks to a Walmart commercial starring Lohan, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried. (Rachel McAdams turned down the gig.) In the trailer, we see shots from the Plastics’ iconic Christmas talent show, prom, and the Halloween party where Cady, once again, has the wrong costume. “Cady, if you don’t dress slutty, that is slut shaming us,” says Bebe Wood’s Gretchen Weiners.
Fey wrote the screenplay, while Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. direct this iteration of Mean Girls, which also features mononymous actor Avantika as Karen and singer and Sex Lives of College Girls star Reneé Rapp, who steps back into the role of Regina George—which she originally played on Broadway. So, get in loser: we’re watching Mean Girls in theaters on January 12.