Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features plot details of Wicked: For Good.
Wicked has been such a cultural juggernaut for the past 22 years that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t well-received by critics when it opened on Broadway. It lost the Tony for Best Musical to a raunchy puppet comedy, and critics dinged it as an “overstuffed,” “strenuous” show with “incoherent and unstructured plotting” that “does not, alas, speak hopefully for the future of the Broadway musical.” Of course, that last concern didn’t exactly pan out, given that Wicked quickly became an era-defining hit that brought a whole generation of young audiences to the theater. But even fans tend to admit that the show’s hour-long second act is much weaker than its 90-minute opener.
So when director Jon M. Chu decided to adapt the show for the big screen, it wasn’t just a chance to immortalize the now-beloved musical; it was theoretically a chance to fix its flaws. And given how much weaker the second half of the story has always been, there was something to be said for the decision to split the musical into two films—one that would preserve what works so well about the college-set first act and one that could provide the time and space to flesh out the dark political saga of the second.
Well, at least in theory. The first film is unquestionably stronger for zeroing in on the burgeoning friendship between Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera) without having to grapple with all the messy act two plotting. We probably wouldn’t have been able to hold space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity” if they were shoved into the middle of an even more overstuffed movie. But the chickens have come home to roost in Wicked: For Good, which strives to make some adjustments to the Broadway source material but doesn’t push things nearly far enough.
Wicked‘s rushed yet sprawling second act is the sort of thing that needed a page-one rewrite to unlock its full potential. Instead, screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox largely do what they did with the first film—make small tweaks and additions but otherwise stay remarkably faithful to the stage show. There’s more new material here than there was in the first film, which gained most of its extra runtime just from giving its scenes and transitions more breathing room than they need onstage. But instead of reworking or changing any of the core problems of the original stage script (which Holzman also wrote), the creative team makes lateral moves.
That starts with at least a little more clarity around what has been going on in the ill-defined time jump between the two halves of the story. It’s been “12 tide turns,” but whether that means one year or five is anyone’s guess. While Glinda is testing out her new mechanical bubble and superfluously flashing back to her poor-little-rich-girl childhood, Elphaba is flying around Oz saving animals and begging them to stay and fight with her in the brand-new song “No Place Like Home”—all new moments added for the movie.
In fact, the stage show mostly forgets about the animals’ plight in its second half, using it more as an example of something bad the Ozian government did rather than something Elphaba is still trying to fight to change. In that sense, it’s nice that For Good keeps the “fight for the defenseless” angle more central—especially given how resonant it feels in the present. But this also skews the stakes of the story. Opening with a shot of enslaved sentient animals makes it a bit less sympathetic that Glinda is happily working as the bright, shiny mouthpiece for the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).
Indeed, given Elphaba’s amped-up role as a pro-animal superhero, it’s not clear why she’s so chill with her college bestie working for the authoritarian government she’s fighting against. For Good takes advantage of Erivo and Grande’s phenomenal chemistry by giving Elphaba and Glinda even more scenes together than they get in the second act of the stage show, including adding Glinda to the Wizard/Elphaba number “Wonderful.” But their relationship is oddly chummy given the heightened stakes of the animal oppression angle.
That chumminess really stands out in contrast to how For Good treats Elphaba’s little sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode)—perhaps the biggest “problem character” of the show. One of the fundamental weirdnesses of Wicked is that it’s a story about chosen sisterhood where one of the characters has an actual sister she’s ostensibly close to as well. Elphaba and Nessa easily could’ve starred in their own Frozen-style story about the complicated dynamics that emerge when an overlooked older sister is taught to subsume her identity to her “golden child” sibling. But Wicked keeps that dynamic on the fringes of its central Elphaba/Glinda story. Nessa is just here because the Wicked Witch Of The West needs to have a sister get a house dropped on her.
It’s helpful to remember that when Wicked debuted, its main selling point was its relationship to The Wizard Of Oz. The second act is designed as a sort of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern-style tragicomedy, where we see the pieces we thought we knew reimagined in a new light. If you watch bootlegs of the original cast performances, moments like the reveal that Boq becomes the Tinsman or references to a just-offstage Dorothy are met with enthusiastic laughter and applause, because they felt like such a novel approach to a classic story.
As Wicked has become a cultural touchstone in its own right, however, that Wizard Of Oz connection has become less important to the core ethos of the show. There are surely plenty of kids who are now seeing these Wicked films without ever having seen the 1939 classic. They care about these characters as characters, not as Wizard Of Oz pawns. And that’s where a supporting player like Nessa suffers. She falls into fascism because her college crush doesn’t like her back—pretty villainous, but also maybe not that much more villainous than what Glinda is up to. Wicked: For Good can’t quite decide during its truncated take on “The Wicked Witch Of The East” (a song that happens onstage but was left off the original Broadway cast recording).
There was some welcome attention paid to shoring up Nessa’s story from a disability representation standpoint. She’s no longer bitter about using a wheelchair and desperate for Elphaba to “cure” her so that Boq will love her. (In the stage show, Elphaba enchants her sister’s shoes so she can walk; in the movie she gives her an emotional boost by having her float in the air.) But Nessa’s sense of interiority doesn’t get the same kind of thoughtful reworking. For Good is still mostly focused on maneuvering her towards her preordained “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” destiny and justifying the Wicked Witch’s obsession with Dorothy’s magical slippers.
Rather than make use of its expanded runtime to delve deeper into characters underserved by the stage version, For Good uses its excessive length to reiterate things we already understood about its characters (like Glinda’s new song “The Girl In The Bubble”) or to heighten storylines that didn’t need to be heightened. In the stage show, Glinda and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) never move past a surprise public engagement. In the movie, Chu gives them a full Crazy Rich Asians-style wedding that gets interrupted at the last second by a random stampede of animals.
Ostensibly, the wedding is there to up the stakes of the love triangle and give Glinda a more dramatic backdrop for her “I’m Not That Girl” reprise. But given that Fiyero doesn’t actually get cold feet, the wedding just happens to be interrupted and then he runs into Elphaba the same way he does onstage, the almost-nuptials just serve to make him seem like an indecisive asshole. Mere hours after he was ready to pledge himself to Glinda, he’s promising Elphaba they’re going to be together forever. Pick a lane!
It’s not that there isn’t enough story here to sustain a standalone film, it’s that For Good just makes some bizarre choices about what to expand. Onstage, there’s literally 13 minutes between Nessa’s death and Elphaba and Glinda singing “For Good”—and that includes a catfight between the two leads, Fiyero’s transformation into the Scarecrow, “No Good Deed,” and “March Of The Witch Hunters.” And while the movie thankfully gives things a little more space, there’s not much more substance.
It still feels jarring to jump from Nessa’s death to Elphaba and Glinda comedically slapping each other over a stolen boyfriend. Nothing about Fiyero’s experience as the Scarecrow is explained. (Do we think he and Tin Man Boq ever acknowledged their former college friendship when Dorothy was out of earshot?) And it’s unclear how he and Elphaba planned such an elaborate trap door/fake melting ruse with just a quick note from a flying monkey. But all that doesn’t matter, because at least we know Glinda had a sad birthday party once!
To the credit of Wicked: For Good, it saves its most impactful changes for last—slowing down and expanding Glinda’s experience after Elphaba’s “death.” Where the first film anchors itself in Elphaba’s story, this one belongs to Glinda. Luxuriating in her takedown of the Wizard and Madame Morrible, while having her welcome the banished animals back to Oz (which doesn’t happen onstage), is a nice way to make her moral awakening that much stronger.
On the other hand, making Glinda such an active force for good also makes it a little less clear why Elphaba and Fiyero have to fake their own deaths and leave Oz forever. Onstage, there’s a sense that the best Glinda can do is stop things from getting worse. But in a world where she’s able to undo years of ingrained animal prejudice in a breezy afternoon, it seems like some Wicked Witch image rehab shouldn’t be that hard for her either.
Still, at least the Glinda stuff is rooted in the themes the movie is actually interested in—like the question of what it means to be “good” and a warning about how “frightening times” can be used to justify oppression. The final shot of the magical Grimmerie book opening for Glinda (another new addition) has metaphorical resonance about the power that can come from personal growth. The question is whether it’s too little, too late.
Ironically, the reviews of Wicked: For Good sound a lot like the reviews for the original stage show—praising the talented cast for doing their best to save a weak script. There’s no doubt that the Wicked films brought the material to a whole new audience and captured its moments of undeniable magic. But considering what a long yellow brick road it took to get from there to here, it’s baffling that Wicked ends up right back where it started.
