137 minutes/rated PG
Directed by Jon M.Chu
Produced by Marc Platt and David Stone
Written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox
Based on Wicked (by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman)
Based on Wicked (the book by Gregory Maguire)
Starring Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum
Cinematography by Alice Brooks
Editing by Myron Kerstein
Music by John Powell and Stephen Schwartz
Opening theatrically the week of November 21, courtesy of Universal Pictures
Wicked: For Good cannot match its predecessor’s “Holy shit… they did it!” sense of surprise, both in terms of Wicked Part One’s overall quality and the extent to which splitting the play into two parts turned the first act into a heartbreaking anti-hero origin story. Good is not the enemy of perfect, and Jon M. Chu’s second “Passion of the Thropp” melodrama delivers a high-energy, big-scale recreation of the source material’s second half.
Whether or not it’s as “great” as Wicked Part One, Wicked For Good is still very good. Or, more specifically, if I jestfully referred to the last film as “a three-star movie with a ten-star ending,” this one is a three-star movie straight down the line. In terms of these various “part two of two” flicks, it’s much closer to Dune Part Two than It Chapter Two.
Set months (or years?) after Elphaba Thropp defied the not-so-wonderful Wizard of Oz, Wicked For Good picks up with Emerald City’s disenfranchised animals suffering ever more. While Elphaba has publicly embraced her role as the “Wicked Witch of the West,” Glinda has been… not-so-reluctantly installed as a propaganda-spewing, or at least narrative-confirming, mouthpiece for the Wizard.
Her “The Girl in the Bubble,” an original song, is solid even as it’s more a triumph of production design and cinematic trickery than a likely karaoke favorite. “There’s No Place Like Home” poignantly acknowledges the push-pull between staying and fighting or seeking safety elsewhere. It’s good enough, and feels organic enough alongside the established tunes, that I didn’t initially realize it was the second of two newbies.
Ephaba does what she can to fight for an animal population and to expose the ruler as a non-magical fraud, even as many of those animals have already given up. Erivo’s Glinda struggles with the consequences of her public persona while Fiyero, now Captain of the Wizard’s Guard, still hopes to find the pariah for whom he has fallen in love. As this would-be heroic trio struggles to balance desire and duty, the grim political status quo continues to bring out the worst in many of those with a vested interest in the current inequity.
A “perfect storm” of tornadoes, tragedy and earthly trespassers will bring this conflict to a head. All of this unfolds as expected for those with even token awareness of The Wizard of Oz. Even noting the first film’s medias res prologue, which all but “spoils” the film’s finale, there is an aggressive sense of inevitable doom and, as Elphaba wages a righteous crusade that she doesn’t really think will succeed, “I burn my life to make a sunrise I’ll never see!” fatalism.
The technical elements continue the “no expense spared” and “what a blockbuster used to be” quality. Alice Brooks shoots with an eye for showmanship while (alongside Chu) almost metaphorically apologizing for the Blumhouse-budgeted small-and-grey Jem and the Holograms movie from a decade ago. Look, you know how I feel about Hollywood giving second chances to properties that didn’t click the first time. However, hypocrisy alert, maybe *this* Jon M. Chu can get real money for Brooks to lens a truly outrageous adaptation?
Jeremy Fuster noted on our “Box Office Podcast” last year that Wicked For Good and Dune Part Two both served as (paraphrasing) “This is what Hollywood is for” proof-of-concept success stories, delivering a mix of quality storytelling and big-screen razzle-dazzle that only Hollywood-sized budgets can allow. Ditto this time around. If the proceedings are less “Every night is girls’ night!” and more “Do you guys ever think about dying?”, the now-more-topical downer elements don’t make the picture any less *entertaining or *fun*.
Moreover, it only serves to enhance Cynthia Erivo’s spectacular two-part blockbuster movie star performance. I’m not going to say she’s “underrated,” since she did get an Oscar nomination last time. Nor will I begrudge Ariana Grande’s showier turn garnering most of the free media. The Nickelodeon sitcom star-turned-pop music icon remains a nuanced delight. But as someone who saw Bad Time at the El Royale as sat slack-jawed, wondering, “Who the fuck is this?!” it’s worth reiterating just how “makes it look easy” good Erivo is.
Jonathan Bailey also makes a compelling tortured hero/romantic lead (how nice that a mixed-race romantic duo in a mainstream blockbuster actually gets to have *sex*). At the same time, Marissa Bode clearly relishes playing the kind of complicated villain rarely offered to differently-abled actors. Michelle Yeoh gets most of the unapologetically mustache-twirling villainy. Jeff Golblum’s conniving man behind the curtain provides a portrait of evil revealed not through monologues or outbursts but through diabolical deeds. All of the performances are up to par with the material’s demands.
Like the show, this second act offers a grim, tragic political melodrama that draws on how the characters from Wicked become the characters we know from The Wizard of Oz as emotional melodrama and outright body horror to negate the need for Andor- or Hunger Games-style violence. And yeah, what worked on stage as a surprisingly successful blend of kid-friendly fantasy and unapologetic grimdark totalitarian tragedy now operates as a poignant commentary on our stupidly awful present.
We’ll see if Wicked For Good joins — sight unseen — Zootopia 2 and Avatar: Fire and Ash as a rare non-Warner Bros. biggie released in 2025 that embraces the challenges of coping with the here and now. Whether or not that remains the case, the irony isn’t lost on me that Jon M. Chu is the guy who directed G.I. Joe: Retaliation. That action sequel debuted in 2013 as pure bubblegum action fantasy only to become, alongside Serve and Report and Our Brand is Crisis, among the most prescient mainstream movies of the last 20 years.
Hell, things have gotten so bad that the still-terrible 1993 Super Mario Bros. flick now looks scarily prescient. Among the more potent observations is how the Wizard notes that those who have been conned would prefer to continue to believe the lie rather than admit they’ve been swindled. It’s not as “America in a nutshell” powerful as when Barry Pepper’s US Cavalry officer sides with the bad guys so he can pretend he’s still among the good guys in The Lone Ranger, but I digress.
It is almost courageous how this second chapter doesn’t try to reverse-engineer a finale on the level of the first flick’s “Defying Gravity” blow-out, since this is telling a different story amid a changed world. Rich in top-tier production value and game actors treating this material as seriously as hoped, Wicked For Good is an old-school Hollywood spectacle. It’s a relic of when such investments would be viewed with awe, partially because the theatrical and post-theatrical ecosystem could justify such a measured bet, rather than trepidation. Wicked For Good is, well, it’s very good, and that’s more than good enough.
