Long before Dorothy came to Oz, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) was a misunderstood young woman with latent magical abilities discernible to sorceress Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the latter of whom was an idol of Galinda (Ariana Grande).  When Elphaba drops off her sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), and Shiz University, the outcast witch is brought on as a private pupil to Madame Morrible, opening her up to the ire of Galinda, made even worse when the pink and blonde popular girl must share her suite with the green-skinned student.  The unlikely pair eventually find some common ground across the semester, but when called to the Emerald City of Oz to meet with the eponymous Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), the two will set off on ideologically opposed courses of lives, threatening their friendship and the entire land of Oz. 

Jon M. Chu directs Wicked, an adaptation of Winnie Holzman musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, itself an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel, from a script penned here by Holzman and Dana Fox.  While Universal Studios played coy with this film being part one of two after the initial press release, the film runs a hefty 160 minutes – the runtime of the entire Broadway show – as it seeks to be a faithful adaptation of both Maguire’s and Holzman’s collective work to create a fuller picture of this extension of L. Frank Baum’s original creation.  The film opened wide after a press tour that started back at the 96th Academy Awards and will exhaustingly run through to the 98th Academy Awards in the late winter of 2026, which, if it did not have such a built-in fanbase between Grande’s following and the fans of the musical, it may be its undoing. With the release of Part 1 marking us at the halfway point of this years-long campaign, Universal, Chu, and the core cast seem to have worked some magic of their own in being absolutely everywhere – including thematic lighting at the Arc de Triomphe – and not turning audiences off from their wares. 

Beyond the source material, Grande is the big draw to the film, given her built-in fan base as a pop star, which is concerning given her questionable acting resume, especially in this more “serious” stage of her career.  Thankfully, though, she does well in this bordering on leading role, seeming to have a better grasp that much of the humor in the script is at her own expense and being able to tap into her pedigree as a Nickelodeon star, embracing that hammy style to decent effect even if it does wear thin.  Next to one half of her bestie duo, Pfannee (the insufferable Bowen Yang) or her love interest, Fiyero (the dull Jonathan Bailey), that Grande is doing anything of even slight remark is a salve against watching this miscast ensemble bumble around the set, more or less directionless.  What is most concerning, though, is how Chu seems totally unsure of how to handle the music in this film, which is evident right from the start, allowing Grande to reach a register so high and lofty that the lyrics become undiscernible to anyone who has not been listening to the OCR since the days of the early iPod.  Now, this is most certainly a symptom of Schwartz’s songs more than anything of Chu’s own making, but with such a messy overture and opening number, Wicked sets a dangerous precedent for itself to get away with underdelivering. 

While Grande is scorned by this mismanagement, what Chu does with Erivo’s Elphaba is downright criminal.  Across the press tour, cast and crew are quick to remind us that they did almost all of their singing live for the camera, you would never tell that given that Chu instructs cinematographer Alice Brooks to place and move the camera in some of the most beguiling locations during the songs that give the vocals an out of body quality to them as if they were ADR.  In Erivo’s first major song, “The Wizard and I,” the camera is often far away from the actress or swirling around her as she navigates the uncanny valley sets that are stuck in this middle area of looking almost practical, but also incredibly digital; a real slap to Nathan Crowley‘s production design as many of the sets are practical, but have this dull, grey, digital haze spread across them.  This visual quality is not nearly as extreme as the live-action Disney reimaginings, but when put up against what Victor Fleming et al. and cinematographer Harold Rosson achieved with The Wizard of Oz (1939), what is presented here some 85 years later is hardly inspiring. 

Chu’s mishandling of Erivo extends, unfortunately, into the Act 1 show-stopping number – and here, the Part 1 finale – “Defying Gravity.”  The sequence, beyond being exploited by the extensive marketing team diluting its majesty from even those who are not actively tuned into trailers, was run through a shredder, never giving Erivo a long enough ramp to really build up through the emotion and the power of the song, opting instead to cut away to the ensemble staring on in furious wonder at the spectacle which Chu denies his audience of witnessing.  This fault lies wholly on Chu’s shoulders as Erivo does reach the heights she needs to in order to deliver the final moments of the film, but by presenting it in such a fractured way does the performer, the film, and the song itself a massive disservice. It is the most fatal example of Chu’s mishandling of the project, directing editor Myron Kerstein to assemble the music in such a backwards way that never allows the music to shine and use the camera and the editing to complement and expand in ways that the stage does not allow.

Wicked is a film that was too big to fail, and while audiences showed up in drove,s contributing to a historic Thanksgiving box office, the fractures within the filmmaking will be harder and harder to see through the mountains of cash that the title raked in.  It is hard to place the blame entirely on Chu for trying to realize and literalize this world when it was Maguire who expanded on Baum’s original conception of the World of Oz, taking it from a young girl’s dream and turning it into a world of its own.  To be fair, Baum also expanded on his original novel, producing another thirteen sequels across his lifetime, and his publisher, Reilly & Lee, produced a subsequent twenty-seven novels making forty recognized canonical texts documenting the history of Oz, but simply put, Oz works best as a dream, and presenting in in this hyper realized way strips it of all its magic and imagination.  Beyond just the muting of the colors to allow the digital effects to more seamlessly integrate with what was done practically, the entire film just reeks of unimaginativeness; the antithesis to Baum’s initial novel and Fleming’s iconic work.  This is seen early on in the flashback scenes, most notably as young Elphaba stumbles across the frame, but even more so in the creation of the flying monkeys.  The film’s commitment to realism is enough that the sequence is upsetting – in the same way that the earlier Harry Potter films can be upsetting and frightening – but it just looks bad. There is no sense of wonder or of play, here, no spark of fascination when it is realized that the iconic trio of Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, and Jack Haley were all the farmhands or that Margaret Hamilton was both Elmira Gulch and the Wicked Witch. Everything is presented as-is resulting in very flat storytelling. 

Though Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published two years after the Gregory Maguire novel in 1997 – five years before the debut of Holzman’s musical – Chu’s handling of the themes are about on par with how J.K. Rowling handled many of those same themes around class and race inequality while being tethered to the juvenile school setting.  With all that being said, the themes are as timely as ever as race, religion, and creed as being put under the microscope while a not-so-vaguely fascist cabinet is being assembled by a similarly corrupt and inept showman-turned-leader.  Again, here, the visuals get in the way while being just silly enough to feel like the message is being watered down despite its blunt delivery, not to mention the brought in context of Grande’s own troubled history with accusations of cultural appropriation to advance her market appeal as a singer, and here, portraying a character pining after and emulating a character of color for her own personal gain.  It is all very messy and Chu actively ignores the context, but Erivo, who was wrongfully dragged by the media for her reactions and feelings to being erased through fan edits and other instances of marketing, comes out of this film as the only character with any grace or poise; again, not difficult when up against the utterly confused Goldblum or the slightly less-so Yeoh, but still a notable achievement in any right, to come out of this mess of a film relatively unscathed.