For Good, For Better: Reimagining The Familiar A Review of Wicked:For Good
- Arlene Hassan
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Who can say if we’ve been changed for the better?
In just a clock’s tick, Wicked: For Good has swept up over US$177.5 million at the global box office– an astonishing figure for a sequel and a testament to just how feverishly anticipated this release was. It now holds the title of the biggest debut ever for a Broadway adaptation and the third largest opening for any musical film. A triumph, by most measures. Yet critics remain mixed to positive: they praise its emotional backbone and powerhouse performances, while pointing out that the sequel leans more on spectacle than on fresh musical innovation. Early aggregator scores reflect this ambivalence– Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 67%- falling notably below Part One even as box office forecasts predicted a thunderous commercial response.
For what it's worth, Wicked: For Good is not only a strong film, but a surprisingly faithful adaptation– both to the Broadway musical and to Gregory Maguire’s novel, the darker, more politically attuned source material; that often gets diluted in cultural memory. But to truly watch these films fairly, one has to relinquish the tempting but unhelpful expectation that cinema should replicate theater. A film adaptation is not beholden to the stage play; it must become its own entity or risk being judged perpetually incomplete.
The Broadway show is a creature of immediacy: bold, breathless, and calibrated to deliver visceral impact. Big numbers. Bigger choreography. Theatrical trickery. Think of the electric swell in Dancing Through LIfe or the buoyant charm of Wonderful. Jon M. Chu’s films, however, trade theatrical bombast for cinematic intimacy: more close ups. More interiority, a quieter scale in dialogue scenes. It pays off. The audience is pulled closer to intention, to moral turmoil, to the infinitesimal shifts in loyalty and fear. Where the stage sacrifices nuance for communal spectacle, the films sacrifice some theatrical punch for emotional clarity– perhaps explaining why some theatre die-hards bristled at the shift.
Chu’s second installment picks up immediately where Part One ended and propels the story towards its moral and political crescendo. Elphaba, played by Cynthia Erivo, evolves from ostracised outsider to full blown threat to Oz's oppressive state. Glinda, played by Ariana Grande, wrestles with the cost of being “good”– performatively, politically and personally. What unfolds is less about surprising twists and more about emotional resolutions: betrayals, reckonings, and the full bloom of Elphaba’s power, all steering us towards the catharsis fans have held close for decades.
The second act of the stage musical has always struggled: its darker, plainer, weighted down by narrative responsibility. Yet Chu strengthens his adaptation with two new songs: No Place Like Home and the Girl in the Bubble– which deepens both women’s emotional landscapes. These additions feel intentional, almost surgical, grounding Elphaba’s ideological conflict and Glinda’s reluctant entanglement with power.
Other deviations, from clearer depictions of animal resistance to the beautifully mirrored set pieces across both films, give this sequel a more cohesive visual politics. No Place Like Home, sharpens Elphaba’s existential conflict: “Why do I love a place that’s never loved me?” The tension between belonging and exile is what ultimately fuels her final sacrifice.
The Girl in the Bubble is equally effective. It reframes Glinda’s entrapment not as naivety but as self preservation; her belief in her own lies becomes both her armour and her downfall. Chu’s decision to include her in Wonderful, (which is only Elphaba and the Wizard on stage) recenters the women’s relationship as the franchise’s beating heart. Their influence on each other is unmistakable: at times a church, at times a salvation.
Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is a dense political novel: revolutionary, satirical, morally murky. The musical, and now the film, extract its core themes while smoothing its philosophical edges. The ambiguity becomes more accessible, more emotional; the politics more character driven than historical. While the book demands us to sit with discomfort, the films compel us to feel, to empathise, to cry.
In For Good, Chu’s directorial choices here are cleaner, more grounded: no frantic swooping cameras, but emotionally coherent staging. The production design leans industrial to mirror the darker turn of the story; VFX are tighter, more confident. Stephen Schwartz score is fuller, and though new material is minimal, it is purposeful.
Act Two’s somberness is visually amplified through Alice Brooks’s cinematography. Where the first film is backed in daylight, this one embraces shadows and deep colour palettes– symbolism everywhere for those who watch closely. From the luminous melancholy of For Good to the carnivalesque chaos of Wonderful, each frame holds sentimental reasoning.
Erivo is the film's conscience. Her Elphaba is vocally fearless, emotionally precise– a performance built on quiet glances and tightly controlled pain. When she sings, the volume isn't just loud, it's meaningful. Grande, meanwhile, delivers her strongest acting work to date. Critics have praised the immediacy of their live on set vocals, but her performance extends beyond technique: she avoids the bubble gum caricature many feared, opting instead for fragility, hope, cowardice, and charm. Her comedic timing is razor sharp, but her vulnerability is what lingers.
Their chemistry is the oxygen that keeps the film breathing. Their reunion duet– filmed with clear saccharine– tuned rows of theatre patrons into hushed, shimmering puddles. Even when spectacle threatens to overwhelm, the movie rarely forgets to center these two.
A particular delight is Ethan Slater, whose theatre training shapes a precise, memorable Boq and Tin Man. His limited screen time feels measured and meaningful.
Michelle Yeoh, contrary to louder critics, is quietly terrifying as Madam Morrible. Chu cast her deliberately, even against her own admission that she isn’t a singer. But her vocal limitations never overshadow her skill; her Morrible is bone-chilling, akin to Umbridge, in the most effective way. Some of the pushback against her casting, let's be honest, reeks faintly of racism– how very Nessa Rose’s Munchkinland politics.
Marissa Bode’s Nessa Rose, gives the character a tragic emotional logic. Her descent into the Wicked Witch of the East is portrayed with aching insecurity and misguided desperation. Chu’s choice to have Nessa to float rather than walk after Elphaba’s spell– adds a layer of symbolic yearning: her heart's desire has always been social not physical. The decision to exclude her crushed body from the screen is a deliberate act of respect. A rare adaptation change that is both progressive and narratively smart.
Wicked’s messiness, its earnestness, and tangled longing convey a sincerity that stands out as its strength. The allegory hits harder than many may realise; the political anxieties of Oz mirror our own, especially in this era when governments and empires consolidate power through soft propaganda and fear.
And for a story that's lived for a century– beginning with Baum, reinventing itself through MGM technicolour, reshaped again on Broadway in 2003, and now reborn on the screen– that emotional inheritance feels like the point.
The film climaxes at For Good– a striking articulation of what Wicked is about: belonging, forgiveness, and change. The stripped down staging and the rawness of Erivo and Grande’s performances create an almost unbearably intimate experience. When Elphaba whispers “It’ll be okay, I love you.”-- an improvised moment– the emotional clarity bypasses logic and lands directly in the audiences’ chest.
The ending is painfully tender. Glinda, now ruling Oz; Elphaba and Fiero, safe and elsewhere. Both women gaze out into a sky streaked with a rainbow, two lives separated by politics but tethered by love. A final flashback of girlhood and warmth becomes homage to companionship, to growing up together, to changing each other irrevocably. It echoes the iconic Broadway poster in a way that feels earned, not gimmicky.
Wicked: For Good is a passionate, thoughtful adaptation. It honours its predecessors while inviting a new generation into the fold. You can feel the care– in the performances, in the staging, in the attention to detail. It is tender, messy, earnest: an inheritance of girlhood, friendship, and the complicated beasts we become in the name of goodness.
A Story over 100 years old, retold once more.
And somehow, still powerful. Still timely. May it be so… for good.
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