Wicked (Universal, Marc Platt Productions, Moving Pictures, SKY Studios, Québec Production Services Tax Credit, Icelandic Film Foundation, Dentsu, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 9) my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of the 2024 film Wicked, which we had briefly considered going to see in a theatre before it came and went. I’d bought it from amazon.com as a pre-order and it had arrived late the previous week. Wicked was actually a disappointment, mainly because it had been so heavily “hyped” as the greatest thing in years. Wicked began life in 1995 as a novel by Gregory Maguire, who said later he was inspired by a real-life case in 1993 in which 10-year-old James Bulger murdered two children even younger than he was: “If everyone was always calling you a bad name, how much of that would you internalize? How much of that would you say, all right, go ahead, I’ll be everything that you call me because I have no capacity to change your minds anyway so why bother. By whose standards should I live?” Wicked did well enough as a novel that Maguire got to write at least three sequelae, Son of a Witch (2005), A Lion Among Men (2008), and Out of Oz (2011). Wicked is basically a prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Baum’s own Oz sequelae and the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz (though Charles resented that Baum’s name did not appear on the credits of the Wicked film). In 2003 Wicked became a Broadway musical, with book by Winnie Holzman and music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, whose previous credits included Godspell (1971) and Pippin (1972). It was a big enough stage hit that film adaptations were nosed around for years (though Universal, which had bought the rights to Maguire’s book before the stage version, insisted on being enlisted as co-producers of the stage musical with the understanding they’d have first dibs on a film version), but it didn’t make it to the big screen until director Jon M. Chu took it on in the early 2020’s, with Holzman and Dana Fox writing the screenplay.

It’s about the rivalry between Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), who will grow up to be the Wicked Witch of the West (though I remember a silent-movie version of one of the Oz books in which the Wicked Witch’s name was “Momba”), and the insufferably “nice” Golinda Upland, later Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera). They first meet as teenagers at Shiz University (read: Hogwarts) in an earlier incarnation of Oz filled with talking animals. Indeed, their original sorcery professor is a talking goat named Dr. Dillamond (voiced by little-person actor Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones fame). Elphaba is taken aside by Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh, fresh off her Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once) and offered private lessons in sorcery, while Golinda only gets a “training wand” she’s unable to use with any effectiveness. Elphaba is the half-sister of wheelchair-bound Nessarose (Marissa Bode), whose father is the Governor of Munchkinland (Andy Nyman), only Elphaba’s father is not the Governor but a stranger with whom the two girls’ mother (Courtney Mae-Briggs) had extra-relational activity. Accordingly, when Elphaba is born she shocks everyone at the Munchkins’ court by turning out green all over, and she’s instantly ostracized the way Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was. Elphaba also has amazing occult powers but can’t control them, and it’s to learn how to manage them that her mom and stepdad send her to Shiz. (I wish they’d have come up with a nicer name for the witches’ school than something that sounds uncomfortably like “shit.”) Elphaba’s character seems an awful lot like the ice princess Elsa in the Walt Disney Enterprises film Frozen (2013) – and the resemblance isn’t altogether a coincidence because Elsa was voiced by Idina Menzel, who also played Elphaba in the original 2003 stage version of Wicked.

Elphaba and Golinda meet at Shiz, and their first encounter is when Elphaba shows up at Golinda’s room – they’ve been assigned to be roommates – and it’s all full of Golinda’s well-appointed trunks and shoe cases, including pairs of both silver (as in Baum’s 1900 novel) and ruby (as in the 1939 film) slippers. It reminded me of the marvelous scene in the 1937 film Stage Door in which Jean Maitland (Ginger Rogers) meets stuck-up rich bitch Terry Randall (Katharine Hepburn) at the rooming house where they and the other aspiring actresses live, and Jean is so appalled at the amount of stuff Terry has brought she says, “We could leave the trunks here and sleep in the hall. There’s no use crowding the trunks.” Elphaba hits on the idea of asking the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum, though we don’t find that out until much later in the movie) to cast a spell on her so she won’t be green anymore. Madame Morrible offers to forward her letter to him. In the meantime a hot young man named Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) shows up at Hogwarts – oops, I mean Shiz – and Elphaba, Golinda and Nessarose all immediately are attracted to him. But when Fiyero starts chatting up Nessarose, Golinda immediately sets up Nessarose with another guy, Boq (Ethan Slater), so she can have him for herself. We’ve already gotten the joke: despite all her pretensions to be “good,” it’s Golinda who’s actually the psycho bitch while Elphaba is the truly nice girl who’s just getting more and more embittered by the prejudice she encounters because she’s green. (I couldn’t help but think of the old Sesame Street song, “It’s Not That Easy Being Green,” and even before that the 1948 anti-racist film The Boy with Green Hair.) Elphaba and Fiyero also get together to organize for animal rights, since they notice that the talking animal professors at Shiz are quietly disappearing and being replaced by humans. The Wizard of Oz finally sends a letter to Elphaba inviting her to the Emerald City and stating at the bottom, “This invitation is not transferable.”

Elphaba asks Golinda to come along with her (why?) and, after traveling there in a beautiful green Art Nouveau train that briefly turns Wicked into a steampunk movie (oddly, when I pointed that out to Charles he said Baum’s original Oz books could also be called steampunk – though Baum wrote them when it wasn’t yet a done deal that electricity, not steam, would be the big source of future energy and cars would run on gasoline instead of steam), they’re received by a monkey into a great hall that isn’t that different from the one we remember from the 1939 film. The Wizard of Oz speaks to them via a giant metal contraption (not just a projected head as in the 1939 movie) and claims to be able to read the spells from an ancient oddly-shaped book called the “Grimmerie.” (I was taken aback by the title because one of the reasons Lyman Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the first place was because he hated the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales and wanted to create some of his own which would be uniquely American.) Of course the supposed Wizard can’t read the spells in the Grimmerie – as in Baum’s original, he’s just someone who drifted to Oz in a hot-air balloon and has no wizarding powers whatsoever – but Elphaba can. She starts reading aloud from the Grimmerie, and whatever she’s reading triggers a spell among the monkeys that enables them to fly. Elphaba is shocked to realize that the disappearance of the talking animals from Oz is being masterminded by the Wizard himself, and her supposed friend and mentor Madame Morrible is also in on it. The idea is to unify Oz by finding a scapegoat that can’t fight back, and the talking animals serve the same purpose to the Wizard and Morrible that Jews served to Hitler and immigrants serve to Trump. Elphaba and Golinda (who’s since dropped the “o” from her name and is now simply Glinda) try to escape the Wizard’s castle in his old hot-air balloon, but the Wizard’s minions close the ceiling door in time and the balloon crashes to the floor of the castle. No problem: Elphaba’s spells have turned her broomstick into an aircraft, and after she sings the movie’s strongest song, “Defying Gravity” (which finally gives Cynthia Erivo a chance to show off her amazing high notes), she simply escapes on her flying broomstick to become the Wicked Witch of the West. A title comes up, “To Be Continued,” and apparently Jon M. Chu’s original plan was to release both this first half of Wicked and the already-completed but unreleased second half as a five-hour mega-movie with an intermission between them. (Erich von Stroheim lives!)

Alas, Universal’s “suits” said no and the movie went out as a 2-hour, 40-minute release with only the first half of the story (though I must say the part we got to see this time around did come to a satisfying and reasonably convincing resolution). A number of theatre organizations producing the stage version of Wicked since the film came out have actually advertised it as a chance for audiences to see the whole story and not just the truncated part that’s in the movie. I was more than a little disappointed in Wicked, mainly because it had got such critical raves (including positive comments online from people who said they usually don’t like musicals, but they loved this one). Charles said at least it was better than the Oz sequel Emerald City, which had aired in 2017 as an NBC-TV mini-series and sinned far more against the original spirit of L. Frank Baum’s creation than Wicked did. One of the things I didn’t like about Wicked was it was one of those fantasies in which the writers figured that because it was a fantasy, they could make anything happen they wanted, plot consistency be damned. Charles actually thought it had a stronger set of rules than that, but he faulted the film because all its songs are “productions” that fit into the context of the story but aren’t really good enough to stand alone on their own. Ironically, that would also have been true of the 1939 The Wizard of Oz movie if the idiots who wanted to get rid of the song “Over the Rainbow” (including MGM’s music publisher, Jack Robbins) had had their way. It also doesn’t help that Stephen Schwartz just isn’t as good a songwriter as Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, who wrote the songs for the 1939 film. I didn’t actively dislike Wicked but I didn’t really like it, either. I would say of it what I said about The English Patient (1996): it’s a great two-hour movie that unfortunately lasts 2 hours and 40 minutes. Though I haven’t seen it since its initial theatrical release in 1985, I think Walt Disney’s production Return to Oz is quite the best Oz movie since the 1939 version. It had a sense of wonder largely missing from Wicked, despite some good moments (I especially liked the Emerald City library, with its books on revolving concentric circles accessed like the submarine in Buster Keaton’s The Navigator, the “dancing on the ceiling” room in Royal Wedding or the flight attendant serving a drink in zero gravity in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and more than any other effort to redo the Oz world Return to Oz came closer not only to the letter but the spirit of L. Frank Baum.