Wicked‘s second act has a problem, and John M. Chu’s movie version, Wicked: For Good, has some small but important fixes. It isn’t a box-office issue: Part two of Chu’s film adaptation of one of Broadway’s biggest hits has already broken one box-office record, and will likely break plenty more, just like its 2024 predecessor Wicked. It isn’t a fandom issue: At my screening of Wicked: For Good, costumes and themed clothing abounded, with fans wearing green or pink to align with the lead characters; early viewers are already raving about the movie on social media. (Critics lean positive, but are a bit more reserved.) It isn’t even the much-discussed problem that all of the musical’s biggest and best songs are in the first act.
The movie’s real problem is one that’s plagued every form of Wicked since the original novel that kicked off the franchise: As a story, it’s too beholden to the original Wizard of Oz.
Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West spins The Wizard of Oz into a politically complicated dark fantasy, giving the characters and the world they live in far much more depth and dimension — until the end of the novel, when Elphaba suddenly halts a rich, intellectual, morals-driven career as a rebel and revolutionary in order to obsess over Dorothy’s stolen shoes.
It’s possible to justify her terrorizing a teenager by noting that she’s mourning her sister and losing her mind as she fights an unwinnable battle against the Wizard of Oz and his minions — but in Maguire’s book, the abrupt transition from the original material to playing out the familiar scenes from the 1939 movie version of Wizard of Oz never feels convincing or properly motivated.
The stage musical, and now the movie version, follow suit to some degree: Fitting the action of the original Wizard of Oz requires Elphaba to lose most of her nuance as a character, and it’s hard to swallow her transformation from the proud, noble victim of bigotry, betrayal, and a vicious propaganda campaign to the cackling villain who threatens to murder Dorothy over her footwear. It doesn’t help that in the Broadway musical, that transition largely happens over the course of a single song, “No Good Deed,” where Elphaba, in a frenzy of grief and worry over her lover Fiyero, tries to save him with magic, decides it isn’t working (though it’s unclear why), decides he’s dead (though she has no evidence of that), and swears off righteous causes forever.
But with Wicked: For Good, Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba, along with Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox’s script, offer some correctives for the story’s biggest weakness. The movie has a few shades of meaning that the Broadway musical doesn’t: While Erivo still says she wants Dorothy’s ruby slippers because they’re “all she has” to remember her sister Nessa by (patently untrue, but we can let that go), the movie plays that impulse as comparatively temporary.
As of the performance of “No Good Deed,” it feels like Elphaba has already decided she can’t win the war in Oz, and that it’s time to move on to a life she defines for herself. Even by the time she captures Dorothy, in accordance with L. Frank Baum’s original book and the 1939 movie, she already has her plans in place for what comes next — and that plan doesn’t hold the slippers or Dorothy herself as particularly important.
What is important in Wicked: For Good, even more so than in the Broadway musical, is the relationship between Elphaba and her best frenemy Glinda. Chu and the writers lean into that relationship even more throughout this Part 2 movie. The Elphaba-Glinda connection is heavily expanded in Wicked: For Good, which adds more second-act meetings between them, more reprises of the Act I songs as they reminisce about each other, and more chances for them to redefine and reshape their relationship.
In the end, Dorothy, her shoes, and her mission to kill Elphaba wind up sidelined even further here than they were in the Broadway version of the story. They’re what they always should have been — a side plot that Elphaba has almost no time for amid everything else she’s juggling, and little more than an inside joke for viewers who are already familiar with how Dorothy’s story looked from her own point of view.
If anything, Wicked: For Good makes the Dorothy story feel mildly hilarious in retrospect. Of course this naïve, easily overwhelmed Kansas girl would see herself as the main character of the tale. Rewatch the original 1939 movie; Dorothy is in over her head at almost every moment of the film, and while she’s kind to other people, she’s monomaniacal about getting home to Auntie Em. Of course she’d have no idea there were much bigger, more emotional, and much more significant stories going on around her small quest to go home.
But Wicked: For Good marks the first version of the Wicked story that really feels like Dorothy isn’t taking up too much space in Elphaba’s finale. In this movie, the action of Wizard of Oz is fully and properly sidelined to make room for the original material. Elphaba being willing to abandon the battle for Oz will always feel like a bit of a disappointment, given her big dreams and big heart. But at least here, that decision finally feels fully motivated, and not like it was forced on the story by the need to slavishly follow the plot of the Baum book that started the Wicked story 125 years ago.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
