Release Year: 2004

Genre: Comedy

Director: Mark Waters

Writer: Tina Fey

Stars: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese

Mental exercise: picture your high school cafeteria. Now, pick a seat.

Where did you land? Guzzling protein shakes with your fellow jocks? Trash-talking over Settlers of Catan with the rest of the nerds? In the back, with the lunch ladies, because of the free creamed corn and helpful advice? Wedged between your fellow art freaks?

The point is, everybody has their clique.

Mean Girls is all about the trials and tribulations of high school tribalism. (Go ahead. Say that ten times fast.) When Cady Heron enrolls at North Shore High after being homeschooled in Africa by her research zoologist parents for her entire life, she quickly discovers that high school and the African savanna aren't that different from one another: it's kill or be killed, and where you sit in the cafeteria is key to your survival.

Written by Saturday Night Live star Tina Fey and directed by Mark Waters (Freaky Friday) on a production budget of $17 million, Mean Girls hit theaters on April 30th, 2004. The female-fronted high school comedy was a surprise smash hit, raking in $24.4 million in its opening weekend. It would go on to gross over $129 million worldwide and give a hearty bump to the careers of all then women involved, from Fey to stars Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lizzy Caplan, and Amanda Seyfried (source).

Mean Girls was queen bee at the box office because teen audiences—especially the girls—saw themselves and their classmates on the big screen. Even better, they saw their high school's treacherous social hierarchy and rules for popularity get dissected and destroyed by the film's clever satire.

And Mean Girls not only gets that high school is a battlefield of cliques, with hidden rules lurking like land mines. This movie exposes those land mines, and gives us—whether we're still in the trenches of high school or still reeling from it, thirty years later—hope that things get better.

But it's not all hardened battlefield wisdom. This movie has a heart of gold lurking under its grizzled exterior. It'll make you feel warm n' fuzzy, it'll have you quoting along and—this one's a gimme, seeing as how it's written by Tina Fey—have you rolling in the aisles.

Whether you're a band geek, a theater kid, a junior varsity cheerleader or a Mathlete, no one's immune to this movie's hilarity.

Four words: Mean Girls transformed entertainment.

Mean Girls showed that female-centric comedies featuring three-dimensional women who don't talk about dudes 24/7 can make money and affect pop culture—and girl, did Mean Girls affect pop culture.

What sets Mean Girls apart from most films with a female lead is that Cady's surrounded by other women instead of being a cardboard cutout, "independent woman" trying to show the guys that she belongs in their clique/workplace/sport/et cetera times infinity.

She isn't noble or determined; she's just Cady, a high school junior who wants what high school juniors want (popularity) and who messes up like high school juniors mess up (frequently).

And the female characters surrounding Cady all have depth, too…except maybe Karen.

This is the Remix

Even today, when certain things in Mean Girls are super-outdated—Kelis' "Milkshake," the idea of a physical Burn Book, or those very turn-of-the-millennial fashion choices—people are still in love withthis movie. There's a Mean Girls musical, Buzzfeed regularly runs lists titled "Ways Mean Girls Would Be Different If It Were Set in [Insert Year Here]," and every anniversary of Mean Girls' premiere is marked with thinkpieces galore.

On top of being female-driven and flat-out funny, Mean Girls is also highly relatable. That's a potent combo—and the reason why Mean Girls developed one of the very first online fandoms. It's immeasurably quotable, and those lines, penned by Tina Fey, are applicable in a never-ending stream of situations.

Phrases that didn't exist before 2004—"You go, Glen Coco!" "That's why her hair is so big—it's full of secrets!" "Stop trying to make fetch happen," and "On Wednesdays, we wear pink!" to name only a few—suddenly were applicable to a variety of situations.

The movie's themes are so universal that Mean Girls quotes even appeared on images that have nothing to do with being a high-schooler in 2004—they've been slapped on everything from The Hunger Games to Kim Jong-Un.

The movie doesn't just have a sweeping online fandom; it gave birth to the double fandom, too, which is what happens when you stick a Mean Girls quote on a still from Harry Potter. In other words, Mean Girls is the mother of remix culture.