QUICK HIT: Wicked: For Good [2025]

Rating: PG | Runtime: 137 minutes
Release Date: November 17th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Universal Pictures
Director(s): Jon M. Chu
Writer(s): Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox / Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman (stage play) / Gregory Maguire (novel) / L. Frank Baum (characters The Wizard of Oz)

For the first time I feel … wicked.

To look at Wicked: For Good objectively is to see two unique forms of category fraud. One, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande should both be billed as leads. Two, if you’re going to demand labeling the latter as “supporting” in the first film, you must agree the former is the “supporting” role in the second. This is thematically true (Glinda is the character changed by its plot) and, I do believe, confirmed by total screen time too.

As for the film itself: if the second half of your story cannot hold up to the first, don’t split them. This demarcation not only augments my issues with the musical being a prologue to a dream that exists outside the dreamer’s mind, but its songs feel like a melody was foisted upon the dialogue after forgetting musicals need music. Its narrative also feels rushed to the point where any political ideas inherent to the whole ‘scapegoats versus charlatans’ conflict become little more than background color for a race to make it all fit together canonically with The Wizard of Oz.

It therefore becomes a two-hour epilogue to a flawed yet coherently drawn predecessor that plays with time too flippantly to wrap our heads around its progressions as anything but external checkpoints devoid of character ambition. And the fact that it holds a “two wrongs make a right” resolution as constructive—that patsies are a necessary tool towards providing an empty-headed rabble direction towards achieving what their opportunistic leader wants them to want—is actually quite terrifying.

Unless, of course, the real message is to reveal how democrats are truly no better than republicans and Americans deserve a third alternative that actually serves the people above the system. Something tells me that’s not it, though. Not when the sole victim of this whole enterprise (Boq) is ultimately transformed into a bloodthirsty killer.

My wish is for this same story to be told from the Grimmerie’s vantage point of providing characters the worst version of their desires en route to remaking Oz in its own nightmarish image.