Tina Fey’s Daughters Convinced Her To Keep A Major Detail In The New Mean Girls Movie

Tina Fey’s daughters are in the business of protecting national treasures. Or at least, stopping their mother from taking a vital part of our social lexicon away from us and changing it irrevocably. Which is exactly what could have happened when Fey was working on the new Mean Girls movie. She planned on changing an important detail and her two daughters stepped in to save the day which is obviously so fetch we can’t stand it.

Fey spoke to Entertainment Tonight at the New York City premiere of the new Mean Girls movie, where she opened up about how her two daughters, 18-year-old Alice and 12-year-old Penelope, influenced a potential change to the film that would have been, in our opinion, disastrous. “Sometimes I would run things by the kids,” Fey told Entertainment Tonight. “Like casting, or you know, like [asking], ‘Should the burn book stay a book, or should it be a private Instagram account?’ And they’re like, ‘No, it’s a book, it’s a book.’”

Imagine Mean Girls without the pages of the burn book flying all over the hallway after Regina George double-crossed Cady Heron. What a loss that would have been.

To Fey’s credit, she did tell USA Today that she “knew what my instinct was,” but wanted to run it by her daughters. Who became fierce defenders of the holy burn book. “My older daughter was like, ‘Yeah, no. Don’t let those millennials overthink it!’”

The directors of the new Mean Girls movie Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. were focused on modernizing the original film, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, in ways that were timeless rather than trendy. While smartphones are obviously part of the story and the music in the movie has dances that are choreographed in a TikTok-friendly way, the film doesn’t rely on trendy Gen Z vernacular as a plot device. Which feels like a good idea. A better idea than the original trailer being released alongside a message that this was “not your mother’s Mean Girls,” leaving millenials and moms feeling attacked.

Not that it will stop anyone from seeing the new Mean Girls movie when it comes out in theaters this Friday, of course. We are cool moms one and all, after all.