With this summer’s blockbuster season ranking as the least attended since 1981 and the October box office notching its lowest monthly total ever, Hollywood is in desperate need of a magic wand to save the industry from its slump. Right now, all eyes are turning to Oz as analysts predict that Wicked: For Good will reverse the trend and become the highest grossing of film of 2025.
That’s going to be a heavy lift, since the film’s two leads seem determined to do everything they can to alienate half the country. During the press tour for the first Wicked film, Ariana Grande (Glinda the Good Witch) and Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West) not only appeared startlingly emaciated, but gave bizarre, politically-charged interviews sure to turn off anyone to the right of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Erivo obnoxiously decried innocent fan art that redesigned the movie poster to look more like the Broadway Playbill, complaining that it “degrade[d]” and “erased” her. Then, in response to a reporter’s question about the stage production, she described it as part of “queer canon,” a sentiment Grande echoed.
“Oz has always been a queer place, a safe place for queer people for every different color of the rainbow,” Grande said. “The gayer the better.”
And yet, despite their red-carpet politicking, Wicked has always been a conservative fable. Yes, that’s correct: Wicked is thematically right-wing. Whether or not the creative team recognizes it, the narrative is built around skepticism of centralized power, distrust of media manipulation, and a fierce defense of objective truth.
The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is a foreign invader who arrives in Oz and consolidates control over its disparate regions through deceptive displays of strength, embodying the archetype of the globalist technocrat. He leverages a compliant, dishonest press to create false narratives that will reshape public opinion so he can impose top-down authority over communities that once enjoyed self-rule. His regime suppresses dissent, persecutes politically disfavored classes (in this case, the sentient Animals), and relies on the notion that “truth is what we agree upon,” a relativism that Elphaba vigorously rejects. She, by contrast, argues that truth and morality are unchanging, regardless of whether anyone else agrees.
Elphaba’s story arc is not, as we have seen with other villain rehabilitations like 2014’s Maleficent, an attempt to excuse evil by blaming painful formative experiences. Instead, the official Oz account was fake news all along, the cover circulated by a corrupt government — aided and abetted by a complicit media — to deflect attention away from Elphaba’s crusade to restore individual rights. She is targeted precisely because she stands between the establishment and the ordinary citizen. Elphaba is not redeemed — she is vindicated.
Unfortunately, conservative is not the same as entertaining. There, unfortunately, Wicked: For Good (rated PG for action violence and a slightly suggestive romantic scene) fails to live up to its title.
The first film largely followed the path of the stage production. So, even though Erivo and Grande’s performances didn’t come near to matching the energy and wit that Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth brought to Broadway, powerhouse ballads like “Defying Gravity” (so good Disney ripped it off for Frozen) and comical ditties like “Popular” and “What Is This Feeling?” still managed to entertain. And the pageantry of scenes like Elphaba and Glinda’s arrival to the Emerald City was visually arresting enough to hold attention through the long 2-hour-and-40-minute run time.
Wicked: For Good is 20 minutes shorter but feels about an hour longer. The plot is padded to fill out a sequel that could have been wrapped up in 30 minutes. The new songs from Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz boast none of the sly humor or subtle poetry of the originals, and the few original songs remaining to this second half of the story are performed with little apparent recognition of their meaning.
A prime example is Glinda’s “Thank Goodness.” On stage, Chenoweth turns the song into a miniature nervous breakdown, in which the audience can hear the exact moment she rejects self-awareness and doubles down on delusion. Grande sails through the same lyrics with a pretty smile and zero outward acknowledgment of the subtext in expression or voice. MacGuffins also abound. Something that is initially presented as a dire plot point, like what will become of those bejeweled shoes, is later shrugged off as unimportant.
Just like the ruby slippers, Wicked: For Good is still a candy-colored spectacle and a handful of sequences are impressive, but the substance is as ephemeral and weightless as that bubble Glinda travels around in.
By the time you get to the end, you’re simply ready for it to pop.
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