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In 2004, I was 11 years old, and Mean Girls was everywhere—including in my middle school. Which is why, on principle, I boycotted my classmates’ new favorite film until I was several years older and slightly less sensitive to fictional displays of bullying. While I can’t say it’s become one of my favorite movies, I can appreciate a great Lindsay Lohan performance as much as the next gal.
But even as a moderate Mean Girls liker, I want better for the superfans than this year’s official “It’s October 3rd” stunt: chopping the entire film up into 23 parts on TikTok. To no one’s surprise, it’s a terrible way to watch a pretty good movie.
Across 23 low-quality parts of variable length, Paramount has made all 97 minutes of Mean Girls available to watch for free, without ads. The trade-off, of course, is that you have to be as active a viewer as possible. TikTok doesn’t automatically move forward once you’ve finished watching a video, which is normally fine. But what if you want to watch the movie on your desktop, as I did, in a separate window while you “work”? You may end up watching the same five minutes on a loop, lest you stop paying attention before it ends.