“Every store sells Mean Girls T-shirts with our faces,” she continued. “Don’t I [get something from that]? Even the girl at TSA tells me it’s her favorite movie.”
Seyfried didn’t share any details about her original Mean Girls contract, but this isn’t the first time someone has accused Paramount of cheaping out despite the film’s overwhelming cultural impact. In 2023, Rosalind Wiseman—the author of Queen Bees And Wannabes, the book on which Mean Girls was based—claimed she was considering taking legal action against Paramount and script writer Tina Fey over what she considered “unpaid dues” for the success of the film. Entertainment Weekly explains that Wiseman sold the rights to her book for $400,000 in 2002 (what she called a “terrible contract”), but had a provision stating that she would earn residual gains from the film’s net profits, dependent on its box office success. She now claims that the studio told her the film didn’t make enough revenue to share.
“The movie has made so much money, and they keep recycling my work over and over again, so to not even consider me,” she said. “What’s hard is that they used my name in the Playbill (of the Broadway adaptation)… And Tina [Fey], in her interviews, said I was the inspiration and the source, but there was no payment.”
“I believe strongly when you’re in a position of power and privilege that you have a responsibility to share that to create equity,” Wiseman concluded. Sounds like it’s time for everyone to gather in the gym and do some trust falls.
