OPINION — As a long-time fan of the musical Wicked, I was thrilled when I learned it was finally being brought to the silver screen a few years ago.
I was decidedly less thrilled when I heard it was being split in two.
That’s right: the 2 hour, 45 minute stage production (a runtime which includes a 15-minute intermission) was going to be dragged out across two movies with a combined runtime of almost five hours.
I know that as a longtime fan who has seen Wicked on stage multiple times across three continents, I’m a little biased.
So I decided to withhold my judgement until I’d actually seen both films.
Perhaps director Jon M. Chu and writers Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox needed the extra hours to flesh out some of the weaker plot beats from the stage production.
Maybe leading ladies Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande had given such groundbreaking, transformative performances as Elphaba and Glinda respectively that the one-year wait between films wouldn’t even matter.
I hoped these movies would prove me wrong.
I doubted they would.
And would you look at that, I was right – the decision to split Wicked into two films was a bad one (at least in my opinion).
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Having just seen Wicked: For Good, I can confirm that much of the 2 hour, 17 minute film feels like a meeting that could have been an email.
Without giving away any major spoilers, I can reveal that significant time is dedicated to flashbacks and extended sequences that add little (if anything) to the film’s overarching narrative or individual character arcs.
We also get two original songs that feel uninspired despite being composed and written by Steven Shwartz, the same man behind the original stage musical.
The songs No Place Like Home and The Girl in the Bubble don’t even give leading ladies Erivo and Grande the opportunity to flex their vocal skills, which might have at least distracted from how lacklustre they are, so why even include them?
(This is a rhetorical question; the songs were obviously included in the hopes of snagging an Academy Award for Best Original Song.)
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Then there’s the pacing of Wicked: For Good, which wanders through the first act, picks up pace in the second, and speed-runs the third.
Which is a shame, given that the third act is without a doubt the strongest.
Erivo proves once again why she was the perfect pick for Elphaba as she belts out No Good Deed, a song I never truly appreciated until I heard her defiant rendition.
And Grande soars in her performance of For Good, the emotional lynchpin of both the stage musical and now the films.
Her performance had me in tears from the very first note.
I just wish audiences didn’t have to sit through two hours of ‘okay’ to get to the good (in some cases, great) moments of Wicked: For Good.
I wish that Wicked: Part One hadn’t been bogged down with meaningless additions to what is widely regarded as the musical’s stronger first act.
Above all, I wish that Wicked hadn’t been split into two films like so many that came before i
I can see why some movies need to be two-parters, like Frank Herbert’s infamously ‘unadaptable’ sci-fi epic Dune, or The Avengers: Infinity War and The Avengers: Endgame, which were the culmination of years of movies across the Marvel franchise.
But did Wicked really need the two part treatment?
I’d argue no.
Just like The Hobbit suffered when a children’s book was adapted into three bloated Peter Jackson films in the 2010s, Wicked: Part One and Wicked: For Good (who decided on those titles, by the way?) is worse for being broken into two parts.
Sure, the movies have made and will continue to make a boatload of cash – much more than a standalone film probably could have – but is it really worth it?
To production companies, movie executives, and plenty of other people involved, yes.
But for fans like me? No.
Both the stage production and the films end with a final musical flourish that includes the refrain “no one mourns the wicked”, but part of me will always mourn the standalone Wicked film that never was.
Because buried in all of Wicked: Part One and Wicked: For Good’s extra stuffing is one great three-hour movie.
One that hits all the best beats from the musical and adds a extra touches to make it really sing (no pun intended) on the silver screen.
It’s just a shame we’ll never get to see it.
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