[COLUMN] Wicked is Finally Here, But Is It Too Late? | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Wicked. And, I guess, The Wizard of Oz. Wicked is… not bad. If you haven’t seen it yet, and want to go in blind, feel free to bookmark this piece and come back.

Watching Wicked, there’s a real sense of “how did it take so long to make this movie?”

Jon M. Chu’s supersized two-part adaptation of the beloved stage musical is hardly a reinvention. As one might expect, given Chu’s similarly stagey adaptation of In the Heights, his version of Wicked I a very literal translation of the source material to the big screen. There’s nothing here as radical as Bob Fosse’s reinvention of Cabaret or Steven Spielberg’s cinematic sensibility as applied to West Side Story. It often feels like Chu just pointed the camera at the stage musical, and kept on rolling.

As such, Wicked is a fairly direct adaptation of the experience that has been enjoyed by the nearly 65 million people who have seen it on stage in the two decades since it premiered. At the risk of being slightly harsh, Wicked is a fairly mediocre adaptation of an undeniable appealing source material. While the decision to extend the film and split it in half leaves it feeling a little flabby, there’s a strong sense that Chu’s strongest directorial impulse was to avoid getting in his own way.

Wicked has had a long and storied journey to the screen. The stage play is based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, itself a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz as told from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. The novel was itself a hot property, with Universal planning a live action adaptation of the book even before the musical launched. Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz had to make an “impassioned plea” to producer Marc Platt to secure the rights for a stage show.

In hindsight, this was a perfect fit. When Wicked debuted in 2003, Hollywood was already transitioning into an ethereal world of digital effects. This was the year of the Matrix sequels, where Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl trumped Master and Commander at the box office. The superhero revolution was in full swing, taking advantage of computer-generated effects to depict set pieces that could never have been rendered practically.

As such, Wicked was perfectly suited to the hyperreality of the Broadway stage. The show could employ many of the same practical effects that had allowed MGM’s The Wizard of Oz to become an enduring classic: matte painted backdrops, actors in tangible prosthetics, physical props and on-stage effects. Within the confines of the theatre, Wicked could create a version of Oz which still retained the surreal tactility that audiences remembered from the earlier film.

Indeed, while Chu’s cinematic adaptation includes impressive physical sets and production design, the film has the uncanny digital feel that defines so many modern fantasy epics. The colors are just a little too washed out. The backgrounds are extended using computer-generated effects, pushing them into an uncanny space between the obviously fake matte paintings and the real world. Animals that were once anthropomorphic are now photorealistic, and rendered less expressive for that.

This contributes to the sense in which Wicked feels like it has arrived just a little too late. The stage musical evoked a style of Hollywood production that was already falling out of fashion when the show premiered. Today, there is something faintly uncanny about all of this. It’s similar to watching Michael Mann shoot Prohibition Era violence on digital cameras in Public Enemies, albeit nowhere near as conceptually interesting. There, the dissonance was the point. Here, it is a distraction.

Once the decision was made to develop Wicked as a stage musical, it took a couple of years for the idea of a film adaptation of that music to gain traction. In July 2010, there were reports that the production team behind the stage musical had begun taking meetings with directors like JJ Abrams, James Mangold, Ryan Murphy and Rob Marshall. In December 2012, Platt stated that the team “would expect in the near future to begin the process of development.”

Universal originally targeted the film’s release for December 2019, but then pushed it back by two years to make room for Cats. In April 2020, the studio pushed it back again in the context of the global pandemic. In April 2022, it was announced that the musical would be adapted into two separate feature-length films, like Dune or IT. Filming began in December 2022 and wrapped in January 2024, allowing for a shutdown during the strikes.

Even setting aside the factors outside of their direct control, there are reasons why the producers might have preferred to wait to bring the musical to the screen. Producers are often reluctant to release even live recordings of stage shows because of “the fear of cannibalizing ticket sales and incentivizing fewer people to see the show.” The stage show is a premium and exclusive object. Any feature film adaptation would run the risk of diluting the brand.

To be fair, the evidence suggests that these fears might be unfounded. A cinematic adaptation might serve as an advertisement, keeping the show in popular consciousness. The stage musical Chicago saw a surge in audience interest after the release of the Oscar-nominated big screen adaptation. “The whole project has become invigorated, and it happened before the movie broke,” insisted producer Barry Weissler. “Then the movie kept just pushing it up.”

In the year following its own theatrical adaptation, The Phantom of the Opera powered Broadway to its biggest year ever. Just over a year after the release of Joel Schumacher’s film, The Phantom of the Opera became Broadway’s longest-running show. However, this might provide its own incentive to wait for the optimal moment. If nothing else, an incoming movie is a great way to renew audience interest in an older show. While Broadway is struggling to recover from the pandemic, Wicked is thriving as the pending adaptation draws near.

Still, whatever the motivation, the result of these delays is that the feature film adaptation of Wicked arrives into a pop culture landscape already dramatically realigned by the stage musical Wicked. The novel and musical seemed radical and subversive on their initial release. A prequel built around the villain of the original story? At the time, the only real point of comparison for a project like that was George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy, and those three films were highly contested.

Maguire wrote the novel during the 1990s, and was inspired by the media’s coverage of the Gulf War, specifically pointing to a headline that declared, “Saddam Hussein: The Next Hitler?” Realizing the raw and emotive power of that comparison, Maguire “set out to examine the language and propaganda used to marshal brute force against individuals or minorities that might have been opposed to the war.” He hit on a bold idea: who decided that the Wicked Witch was wicked?

The musical landed in the middle of the War on Terror, and spoke very aggressively to that cultural moment. This was a story about the power of propaganda to galvanize a population against some imagined subversive force, using that as an excuse to establish totalitarian rule. In the musical’s telling, as Maguire points out, “though [Dorothy] has never identified a personal ambition to be an assassin, she reluctantly becomes an agent in the Wizard's war on terror.”

That the film adaptation retains some of this punch is largely a credit to Maguire. An early sequence in which an official (Colin Michael Carmichael) outlines plans to lock Oz’s terrified but sentient young animals in cages separate from their parents carries a lot more resonance now than it did twenty years ago. Similarly, Jeff Goldblum’s characterization of the Wizard as a con man who bumbles his way into authoritarianism feels even more timely now than it did when the musical premiered.

Still, a lot of the more pointed edges of both the novel and the stage play have been sanded down by the passage of time. This might be the first true Wicked movie, but it emerges into culture that has already been heavily influenced by the source material. Over the past decade or so, there has been a big wave of crowd-pleasing fantasy spectacles effectively emulating the narrative tricks of Wicked, even if they were not literal adaptations.

Released in 2013, Frozen is the most obvious example of this trend, a revisionist take on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen that frames Elsa (Idina Menzel) as a tragic figure rather than an outright villain. The parallels were not subtle. Menzel had originated the lead role of Wicked on stage. The film’s big musical set piece, “in which [Elsa] decides to, ahem, defy gravity and use the magical powers she's been keeping under wraps”, is set to ‘Let It Go’, a song that Hillary Busis mused “sounds like a more radio-friendly take on Wicked‘s ‘Defying Gravity.’”

That same year saw the theatrical release of Sam Raimi’s Oz, The Great and Powerful, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz that offered another (slightly more sympathetic) origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West (Mila Kunis). Although not a direct adaptation, it was set in the same world at the same time and featured the same characters. While acknowledging the film was “Wicked bad”, critics wondered whether Raimi’s film rendered any attempt to adapt the musical to screen “irrelevant?”

These were the two most obvious examples, but they were not alone. The following year, Disney released Maleficent, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the eponymous witch (Angelina Jolie). Once again, this was an adaptation of a beloved fairy tale cartoon that invited the audience to question their core assumptions about the narrative of the original story. As Pete Travers argued, Maleficent evoked “Broadway’s Wicked without capturing a scrap of the fun.”

This puts Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Wicked in a very strange position. In some ways, it recalls the big screen takes on Flash Gordon or John Carter. Those moves were adapting material that had been a huge influence on George Lucas’ Star Wars, even if Star Wars was not a direct adaptation of either property. As a result, the films could feel a little underwhelming, as if they had arrived late to their own party, their novelty overshadowed by the legacy of works that they had directly inspired.

In the decades that it took to get the musical to screen, what made the stage show so unique has become part of the standard playbook for these sorts of fantasy worlds. Even The Rings of Power has made a half-hearted attempt to do something similar with its take on Sauron (Charlie Vickers). With this in mind, it makes sense that Chu approaches the material with the sort of veneration reserved for holy texts rather than the punkish sensibility reserved for subversive apocrypha.

It’s a miracle that the screen adaptation of Wicked works at all. A large part of that is down to the fact that it’s working with good material. Cynthia Erivo is phenomenal, and Ariana Grande plays well off her. When the two are bouncing off one another, Wicked takes flight. Chu tries not to draw too much attention to the man behind the machine, instead opting to let the original work’s magic shine through, even if the machinery has seen better days. Wicked can defy gravity, but time takes its toll.