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.
For Good picks up some time after Elphaba’s falling out with Glinda and her ousting from polite Ozian society. When she returns, the Wizard and his right-hand woman, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), have successfully turned her into the villain all Oz citizens fear. Still, Elphaba has grown more powerful than any of them; she’s the only one, aside from Morrible, with any real aptitude for magic. She intends to lead a rebellion against the Wizard, but she’ll soon learn that no good deed goes unpunished. Her noble intentions will have disatrous consequences for Oz, and, it seems, for those closest to her.
Wicked makes such a great prequel because it takes such a clever approach to its source material. The origins of things like Dorothy’s iconic ruby slippers, and the cause of the tornado that brings her from Kansas to Oz, are each woven into the prequel organically. The final For Good trailer teases each of those events, tying them to Elphaba’s journey. It even gives us our first look at the Tin Man and Scarecrow, whose origins Elphaba also plays a part in. Without going too far into spoiler territory, the Tin Man wasn’t always made of metal. Not unlike the flying monkeys in Wicked: Part One, he undergoes a painful transformation to achieve his final form, as does the Scarecrow. We’ll get the full story in For Good, making Chu’s duology a comprehensive (if unorthodox) challenge to the original canon.
