Box Office: ‘Mean Girls’ Struts to $3.3M in Previews, ‘Beekeeper’ Buzzes to $2.4M

Pamela McClintock
·2 min read
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Mean Girls strutted to $3.3 million in previews at the North American box office, on par with Wonka.

Paramount’s movie adaptation of the Broadway musical is based on the 2004 big-screen teen comedy that turned into a cultural classic. The new movie is expected to open to as much as $30 million over the long Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, easily enough for a first-place finish.

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Directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., Mean Girls cost a relatively modest $36 million to produce before marketing, and is the latest musical to brave the big screen after Wonka and The Color Purple.

The female-fueled film arrives on the big screen 20 years after the Lindsay Lohan-led cult classic Mean Girls, which was directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey.

Fey later returned to pen the script for the new film, which stars Angourie Rice, Reneé Rapp, Auli’i Cravalho, Bebe Wood and Chris Briney. Fey and Tim Meadows also reprise their roles from the 2004 movie.

The original Mean Girls sports a Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 84 percent; the score for the new film is currently a fresh 70 percent from the first 108 reviews.

Mean Girls is hardly the only new title on the crowded MLK holiday marquee.

Amazon/MGM’s The Beekeeper, the latest action pic starring Jason Statham, hopes to serve as counterprogramming for men and is tipped to open in the mid to high teens after earning $2.4 million in Thursday previews. Such genre pics tend to be frontloaded, meaning it will fall behind Mean Girls as the weekend unfolds.

Legendary Pictures’ and Sony’s Black-led biblical satirical drama The Book of Clarence, is tracking to open in the single digits, despite a star-packed ensemble cast that includes LaKeith Stanfield, RJ Cyler, Omar Sy, Alfre Woodard, David Oyelowo and James McAvoy.

Jeymes Samuel directs the Jesus period pic, with Jay-Z producing.

At the specialty box office, Amazon and MGM expand filmmaker Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction into roughly 600 theaters. The critically acclaimed film, adapted from Percival Everett’s satirical novel Erasure, stars Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated author facing the Black artist’s dilemma. Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae and Adam Brody co-star.

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