Jon M. Chu's adaptation has the good sense to treat the stage musical's songs as the whole point rather than an obligation to get through, and the film is at its best in the numbers that let Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande just sing at each other in a room, live on set rather than lip-synced to a studio track. Erivo's Elphaba carries genuine ache under the film's candy-colored production design, and Grande's Glinda is a sharper comic performance than her pop-star casting might suggest — she plays vapid as a survival strategy rather than a character flaw, and the film is smarter for it.
Splitting one stage musical into two feature films is a strange commercial gamble, and it shows in the pacing — this first half stretches material that used to be a tight first act into a 160-minute runtime, with a few subplots that feel like they're marking time until the second film. But whenever the movie stops filling space and just lets a song play out in full, particularly the second-act showstopper that closes the film, it earns the sprawl.
A maximalist fantasy that never loses the friendship underneath all that green paint and pageantry.
This is fantasy built for maximalists — sets the size of small towns, costumes doing overtime, a whole invented political history of Oz sketched in around the edges of the plot — and it mostly justifies the scale because the central friendship between the two leads stays legible and specific underneath all of it. It's a big, expensive, occasionally bloated movie that still remembers its two best special effects are just its lead actresses' voices.
Wicked is directed by Jon M. Chu and adapted from the Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, itself based on Gregory Maguire's novel reimagining The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Produced by Universal Pictures and Marc Platt Productions on a reported $150 million budget, the film split the stage musical into two parts, with Wicked: For Good following in 2025. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande both sang their vocals live during filming rather than to pre-recorded tracks, a demand the two actresses reportedly made during production. Composer Stephen Schwartz makes a cameo as the Wizard's gatekeeper.
Wicked opened in November 2024 to strong reviews and became one of the year's biggest box office successes, eventually grossing over $750 million worldwide and ranking among the highest-grossing movie-musical adaptations ever released. It received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, with wins for production design and costume design, and both Erivo and Grande earned acting nominations. The film's success reinvigorated interest in the stage musical's Broadway and touring productions and set up substantial commercial expectations for the concluding half of the story.
Wicked's costume-design Oscar carried more weight than the trophy alone: Paul Tazewell, who spent roughly two years building more than a thousand costumes for the film, became the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, three years after his first nomination for West Side Story. The film's box office run was just as record-setting — its $114 million domestic opening weekend was the biggest ever for a movie based on a Broadway musical, part of a $164 million global debut that outpaced comparable stage-to-screen adaptations. For a studio gambling on splitting one musical into two feature films, that kind of opening validated the bet before Wicked: For Good ever reached theaters.
