Wicked: For Good Attempts to Fix the Franchise’s Biggest Story Problem

Photo: Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures/Everett Collection

Wicked has always stumbled in its second half, and John M. Chu’s film continuation, Wicked: For Good, apportions a few precise but meaningful fixes. This isn’t a commercial worry — Part Two has already shattered a box-office record and is poised to post more blockbuster numbers similar to its 2024 predecessor, Wicked. It isn’t a fandom problem either: at my screening, audiences arrived in thematic greens and pinks, and early reaction online has been effusive. Critics are generally favorable, if somewhat cautious. MetaScores reflect that restraint.

The fundamental storytelling flaw that has haunted every iteration of Wicked since Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel remains: the narrative is still overly tethered to the original Wizard of Oz.

Gregory Maguire reimagined Baum’s world in Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, transforming Oz into a morally fraught, politically charged fantasy and granting its players far more interior life — until the book’s final stretch, when Elphaba’s arc abruptly narrows to an obsession with Dorothy’s shoes.

That turn is difficult to fully rationalize. You can read Elphaba’s rage as grief for her sister Nessa and the desperation of battling an oppressive Wizard, but Maguire’s pivot into scenes that mirror the 1939 film never lands with convincing motivation: the shift from complex rebel to the image of the canonical villain feels sudden rather than inevitable.

The Broadway musical — and, to some extent, the films that follow it — inherit that constraint. To sync with Baum’s familiar events, Elphaba’s nuance is often flattened: the proud, principled woman who resists bigotry and propaganda is compressed into a melodramatic antagonist. On stage, that recalibration largely happens within the span of a single powerful number, “No Good Deed,” where grief, panic, and uncertain information push Elphaba into a radical renunciation of her causes. The result can feel emotionally shorthand rather than a fully earned transformation.

In Wicked: For Good, Cynthia Erivo’s performance and the revised screenplay from Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox introduce corrective nuance. The filmmakers temper Elphaba’s fixation on Dorothy’s slippers, treating it less as an absolute obsession and more as a fleeting emblem of loss — an emotional trigger rather than the sole propellant of her choices.

By the time “No Good Deed” plays out, this version suggests Elphaba has quietly accepted that the war for Oz is unwinnable and is preparing to choose a life of her own making. When she later takes Dorothy captive, the film frames that act as part of a broader plan rather than the culmination of an all-consuming vendetta; the ruby shoes are incidental to Elphaba’s true intentions.

Most importantly, Chu and his writers deepen the Elphaba–Glinda dynamic. Wicked: For Good returns repeatedly to their friendship and rivalry, weaving additional reunions, reprises of Act I themes, and intimate moments that allow both characters to reassess and reconfigure their bond. Those added scenes make the relationship feel central and consequential in ways the stage production only hinted at.

Consequently, Dorothy’s subplot — her shoes and her mission to return home — recedes further into the margins here than it did on Broadway. What once loomed like the story’s engine is reframed as a peripheral thread: an inside joke for viewers versed in Baum’s tale and a minor obstacle amid Elphaba’s far weightier concerns.

Viewed from Elphaba’s perspective, Dorothy’s earnestness can feel almost comical. The original 1939 film portrays Dorothy as well-intentioned but overwhelmed — determined to get back to Auntie Em above all else. It’s easy to see how, in a world brimming with political strife and personal trauma, her homeward quest would seem parochial.

Ultimately, Wicked: For Good is the first screen incarnation that truly shifts the focus away from Dorothy’s journey and lets the original material breathe. Elphaba’s decision to step away from the fight will always carry a bittersweet sting given her ideals and potential, but here it reads as a choice earned by character and circumstance, not an after-the-fact accommodation to the plot of Baum’s 1900 novel that launched the Oz mythology 125 years ago.

Source: Polygon