“Mean Girls,” Tina Fey’s 2004 comedy cult classic about a nasty high-school clique, is paying new digital dividends for Paramount Pictures more than a decade later.
Characters from the movie including Janis, Damian, Gretchen and Karen return to Pocket Gems’ Episode choose-your-own-adventure story game with “Mean Girls: Sorority Rush,” in which players navigate freshman year at college — the “University of Evanston” — and must contend with old rival Regina George in rushing the school’s most coveted sorority, Delta Mu Tau.
The first season of the “Mean Girls” game on the Episode app, released last fall, centered on graduating from North Shore High. According to Pocket Gems, “Mean Girls: Senior Year” has garnered 221 million total views since launch with 27 million unique viewers (including 4.3 million million uniques in the first 30 days of release).
“We were thrilled with the overwhelming fan response to season one of the game,” said LeeAnne Stables, president of worldwide marketing partnerships and licensing for Paramount Pictures. “And now this growing fanbase will be able to keep following their favorite girls from the iconic movie as they start their college years. It’s fun and simply hilarious.”
“Mean Girls: Sorority Rush” is available on the Episode app in Apple’s App Store and in the Google Play Store. The app is free to download, with in-app purchases to buy virtual items in the game like new outfits. Episode’s other premium franchise is a series from singer-actress Demi Lovato.
Pocket Gems launched Episode in 2014, and users have viewed over 2 billion episodes to date. The app also lets users create their own interactive stories, with about 4 million creators on the platform. San Francisco-based Pocket Gems has raised $65 million in funding from China’s Tencent and Sequoia Capital.
The “Mean Girls” movie, which starred Lindsay Lohan, grossed $86 million at the U.S. box office, according to Box Office Mojo. It was produced by Lorne Michaels through Broadway Video Enterprises, with Jill Messick exec producing, based on Rosalind Wiseman’s book “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence.”
