Though audiences may have sported pink, buttered their muffins and slashed “fetch” from their vocabularies ahead of the Mean Girls theatrical release this week, there’s one element of the classic Y2K reboot they were evidently not expecting — the fact that the entire flick is a musical.


In a new viral clip, audiences seated for the film, which is set to hit theaters across the nation on Friday, found themselves caught very much off guard during the first few minutes of the movie, discovering that the movie’s direct source material isn’t the iconic 2004 teen comedy, but rather, its 2018 Broadway adaptation.



While at first, the theater full of moviegoers seemed invested enough in the movie, their excitement came to a screeching halt after what appeared to be a musical interlude turned into a musical number as Angourie Rice — a.k.a. Protagonist Cady Heron — burst into song.


“Ahhh!” the audience collectively groaned — one even screaming at the screen — as Rice began singing about her character’s first love at nine years old.


It remains unclear whether or not this harrowing realization prompted audiences to flee the theater like Cady after seeing the bus barreling towards Regina George, yet there’s an important lesson to be learned from this whole debacle  — that’s what you get when you pretend your musical is not actually a musical.