I was stunned by how movingly cinematic ‘Wicked’ is. I shouldn’t be, and here’s why
Essay by Dan Heching, CNN
(CNN) — Over the weekend, I came upon a hilarious post from a good ol’ social media influencer titled “Before Wicked vs After Wicked,” showing him doubting all the initial praise for the new movie – with people telling him, “It’s going to win best picture!” and him exclaiming, “Can we all just calm down please?” – only to find him in tears in the theater at the film’s end, shocked and even annoyed by how much he enjoyed it.
Well, that made me feel stupendiferously seen, as it completely mirrored my trajectory over the past few weeks – many in my world, including a prescient and very clued-in member of my team at work, repeatedly told me how significant and marvelous this movie was going to be, and I resisted.
I felt I had good reason to, though – my mother recommended the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” to me at some point in the late ’90s, and I liked it well enough, but when I got around to seeing the ensuing Broadway musical in the mid-aughts (in the front row, after winning the ticket lottery), I remember feeling like the story was shoehorned in and largely sacrificed in service of the big theatrical musical numbers, only one of which I thoroughly enjoyed (yes, that would be “Defying Gravity” at the end of Act I).
Fast forward some 20 years to a “Wicked” screening last week, where I found myself stunned by how moved I was, how fast the 2-hour-and-40-minute runtime went by, and how splendid the musical numbers I once wrote off felt.
No, I’m not crying, you’re crying.
How did I get here? I wondered. There are several obvious reasons for the Jon M. Chu-directed film’s success: yes, Cynthia Erivo’s emerald green face is like an open book of emotion from the first frame to the last, and yes, all the different currents of chemistry between Erivo and the two other main players – a delightful Ariana Grande and dashing Jonathan Bailey – together and separately fly off the screen. And that’s not to mention the showstopping sets, soaring score and game supporting cast including Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum and Bowen Yang.
‘Wicked’ was initially, and always, intended to be a movie
But there’s another reason that feels just as obvious. Even though I am woefully unschooled in the area of Broadway lore, I did remember the tale of the “Wicked” musical’s inception, and how Maguire initially wrote the book with film stars in mind (including Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas). He always meant for the book to be developed into a film, and wrote in The Guardian in 2021 that sure enough, “the calls from Hollywood came within a week of publication.”
Universal began developing it as a non-musical film, but Maguire recalled that they “weren’t getting satisfactory scripts” and that “the studio was scared about paying $100m to make a fantasy movie with no big male roles.”
To contextualize, this was in the mid-’90s, before the “return of the movie musical” and “Chicago’s” winning of the best picture Oscar in 2003. Enter Oscar-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, who told Grammy.com in an interview published last week that he worked his way “up the Universal food chain to get to Mark Platt, who was running Universal Pictures at the time, and persuaded him not to do it as a movie – at least not right away.”
Schwartz’s arguments for instead making it into a theatrical musical production were spot-on for Universal – it would take considerably less of an investment to bankroll a Broadway production as opposed to a big-budget tentpole film, and, as Maguire wrote, a non-musical “straight film is not going to hit the heart like a musical does.” Quite plainly, songs would allow the perfect opportunity for the central duo of witches, Elphaba and Glinda, to bring audiences into their internal worlds.
Clearly, the Tony-winning Broadway show’s and now movie’s success is a testament to the fact that he had the right instinct. And it took all this time – including time for the glacial-like trends to shift, allowing musicals (or even just musical moments) to appear practically everywhere – to set the stage as it were for this musical movie to enter the chat in such a momentous (and viral!) way.
The DNA of ‘Wicked’ comes from arguably the most beloved musical family movie, ever
But what’s also clear is that the elements that the “Wicked” property is working with are unmistakably cinematic.
While the original 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz” was itself, in turn, based on a book (L. Frank Baum’s 1900 work “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” to be exact), the movie was a watershed moment in cinema – the first major motion picture to use Technicolor – and has remained a cornerstone of culture when it comes to family-friendly fare.
But it was even more than that, as the whimsical opening of the new “Wicked” film demonstrates – minor spoilers ahead.
The opening frames of the new movie pick up just where 1939’s “Oz” left off – showing the iconic pointy black hat sitting on the floor, in the middle of a puddle of water. As anyone familiar with the story of “Wicked” knows, it examines the life of the Wicked Witch of the West from a different perspective, including a look at what happened before the famous events shown in “The Wizard of Oz,” to show what made her “wicked” in the first place. So from that first, dovetailing image, it occurred to me that the new movie is celebrating – even venerating – the singular iconography of that classic character in a way that the musical simply could never do.
Of course that’s not to say that musical production fell short of celebrating and elevating Elphaba in any way, it’s simply about zeroing on a very specific, small and intimate detail, the way a film camera can do, which invites viewers on an altogether different journey. It was from this moment I suspected I was in for something different and ultimately very exciting, and it turns out I was right.
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