Wicked arrived in theaters this weekend and looks set to continue breaking box office records heading into Thanksgiving. It's already had the biggest global and domestic opening for a movie based on a Broadway show and many believe an Oscar is in Ariana Grande's future.
The stage show is a phenomenon, of course, so this level of success was to be expected. Wicked, the first half of a two-parter, pays homage to that with cameos from Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel.
They played Glinda and Elphaba on Broadway and, according to director Jon M. Chu, finding them a memorable role in the movie was a must.
"They weren’t just going to come to do whatever," the filmmaker tells Variety (via SFFGazette.com). "Our inner circle thought of all sorts of things to present to them. Does Kristin play Glinda’s mom? Are they one of the people who says 'The Wizard will see you now'? It always felt underwhelming."
"We had to give them something big. We had this section in 'Wizomania' that needed backstory that we didn’t need in the show: What is the Grimmerie? And an understanding of how the Wizard came to Oz. I was like, ‘What if we do this section as a play? It was supposed to be an amusement park ride like 'It’s a Small World,' which was a fun concept. But if it’s a show, then it’s sort of meta."
"Idina and Kristin play the two most famous actors in Oz. They get to be glamorous and people get to applaud them," Chu continues. "Stephen Schwartz immediately knew what to do and added Idina’s Elphaba war cry and interplay of pushing each other out of the way. It’s fun playing off the lore of two mega stars in the show."
Trailers for Wicked haven't shied away from showing The Wizard of Oz's Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion, and the movie opens with them walking down the Yellow Brock Road after the Wicked Witch of the West is killed.
The hope and expectation is that we'll see much more of them in Wicked: Part Two, something that's been confirmed by shots of them meeting The Wizard in the trailers mentioned above (those scenes weren't in this first instalment).
Chu broke down why he included that nod to The Wizard of Oz in the movie and whether Dorothy will be a full-blown character in the sequel.
"'The Wizard of Oz' is potentially a dream. It’s a world where there are no real stakes. Knowing that Elphaba and Glinda live in a world of real stakes, we had to reestablish with the audience that this was real. So we dropped everyone into the crime scene, maybe the most famous crime scene ever in cinema and literature, of the iconic hat in the puddle."
"We see the full landscape of Oz. It’s this living, breathing place with real cultures, so we immediately establish this is not a dream world. Seeing those four characters also triggers something in your mind; you connect those characters with this place. And we will revisit those characters in movie two."
"In the show, Dorothy is around. They have to intersect, and you can only tease it so much. I won’t say whether she’s a character, necessarily, in movie two. There’s a part of me that wants everyone’s Dorothy to be the whatever Dorothy they want. And yet, there is interaction and some crossover. So I’ll leave that up to 'Part Two.'"
However, with MGM in charge of The Wizard of Oz's rights, there were some things Wicked - a Universal production - was unable to make use of in this big screen adaptation.
"We had boundaries of what we could reference or not. We never use the ruby slippers. Nessa has on crystal slippers as in the Frank L. Baum book, Gregory Maguire book and the show," Chu explains. "I don’t think the phrase 'yellow brick road' is copywritten, but definitely the shape of the road is. We couldn’t do the spiral. We had to do a circle that continues to show it’s not where the road ends."
Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda.
They're joined by Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh as Shiz University's regal headmistress Madame Morrible; Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, a roguish and carefree prince; Tony nominee Ethan Slater as Boq, an altruistic Munchkin student; Marissa Bode in her feature-film debut as Nessarose, Elphaba's favoured sister; and pop culture icon Jeff Goldblum as the legendary Wizard of Oz.
The movie is now playing in theaters, while Wicked: Part Two follows on November 21, 2025.