Why Paramount Didn’t Market ‘Mean Girls’ as a Musical: ‘People Tend to Treat’ Them ‘Differently’
variety.comRebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter You’d be forgiven if you thought butter was a carb, just like it’s totally understandable if you didn’t know the new “Mean Girls” is a musical.
Paramount, which released the movie over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, chose not to explicitly market it as a song-and-dance spectacle, according to the studio’s president of global marketing Marc Weinstock. “To start off saying musical, musical, musical, you have the potential to turn off audiences,” he says. “I want everyone to be equally excited.” The PG-13 film triumphed in its box office debut with $33 million over the four-day weekend.
But despite the cultural prominence of Tina Fey’s 2004 comedy, which propelled Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried to stardom, Weinstock’s job – selling the masses on (and clearing up any confusion about) “Mean Girls” – was trickier than trying to make fetch happen.
The story is the same, following Cady Heron as she moves to Illinois from Africa and navigates the lawless jungle of high school.
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