As the first big-screen adaptation of the iconic Broadway play — and the first film set in the realm of Oz in over a decade — Wicked promised to tell a familiar story from a different perspective. Jon Chu’s two-part saga reframes the tale of The Wizard of Oz through the eyes of its infamous villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, but Wicked: Part One showed us that Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) wasn’t nearly as bad as her peers made her out to be. The 2024 film is mostly a prequel to The Wizard of Oz: It serves as an origin story for Elphaba and other iconic characters like Glinda the Good Witch (Ariana Grande). She and Elphaba first meet while studying magic at Shiz University, forging a tenuous friendship that becomes the heart of this story.
Part One came to an end just as Elphaba ran afoul of the “Wonderful Wizard” (Jeff Goldblum), whose fascistic inclinations were subtly changing Oz for the worse. Her battle with the Wizard will continue in Wicked’s dramatic conclusion, For Good, which tackles the events of The Wizard of Oz from a different angle. Early trailers already teased the arrival of Dorothy, the “real” heroine of this story, but For Good will also show us how her companions — the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Tin Man — came to be... and even how she wound up in Oz in the first place.
