By Liliana Gonzalez
Photo by Carrie Crockett
On November 22, 2024, the Wicked movie, a prequel to the Wizard of Oz, was released into theaters. During the first few days it was available, Wicked had already made $114 million in the domestic box office. Now, it has made $735 million in the worldwide box office.
I had very high hopes for this movie, mostly because I had watched The Wizard of Oz in my younger years and loved it. I begged my mother to take me, and eventually, we both went to see it in theaters. Overall, I had only heard good things about the movie. My friends’ positive opinions on the movie helped encourage me to look more into it and want to watch it. But does the film’s magic live up to the original musical, or does it not quite reach the expectations?
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande played the two leading parts in the movie. Both actresses have amazing voices, and their passion in their vocals and faces makes it easy to believe that they are truly feeling the complex emotions of their characters in real time.
Julia Bates, a kindergarten teacher at Willow, explained, “The music was magical. The movie had such an interesting plot and so many different emotions throughout.”
The colors and effects of the movie were unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Jon Chu, the director, did a great job of making the bright colors used all throughout the movie give a happy and cheerful tone to the different scenes.
Eva Bates, freshman said, “It was so bright, and the colors were so positive.” The two main colors, pink and green, were used to separate the two very different main characters. A bright, emerald green was especially emphasized throughout the entire movie, similar to how it is in the musical.
Another key part of the movie was the costumes. For instance, Lucia Gonzalez, Willow eighth grader said, “The movie was so good. The costumes were so detailed, which is hard to see when watching the musical. Each character had their own personality.”
I would agree that the costumes and makeup were specific to each major character introduced. The elegance and specific features of the costumes made the characters seem like royalty.
But in every movie, there’s a point when enough is enough. The last thirty or forty minutes had me on the edge of my seat, but not for the right reason. Mostly, I wanted to leave by then. Movies are enjoyable for the first hour and half, but anything after that, to me, just feels like you’re being dragged along until it finally ends. The movie was almost three hours long, which is way too long to be sitting in a chair in a dark room. By the end, I was practically asleep. The final scene with the two main characters together in a tower felt like it lasted 30 minutes, which seems like a lot longer than it should have been.
Lola Daschbach, sophomore, agreed, saying, “It would’ve been much more enjoyable if it wasn’t almost three hours long.”
Broadway’s Wicked is famous for its onstage magic and emotional story. The musical in movie form makes it easier to expand on this, making everything more detailed with beautiful visuals. In my opinion, the Broadway show uses the excitement of live performing. Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth have amazing voices that can be recognized anywhere.
The movie can tell the story in a much more modern and easy way, and if it hadn’t been so long, it would have been even more interesting than the musical because of the technological possibilities of film, like CGI and autotune, which cannot be used in a musical.
The fact that we’re still telling this story in 2025 got me interested in the history of the tale. The long and complex saga started with the original book by Frank L. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900. In 1939, the movie The Wizard of Oz was released. It was one of the most groundbreaking films in terms of its use of Technicolor that marks a shift in the story from the black and white the film starts in, which was the norm at the time. Only a handful of films had been made in Technicolor at the time, and none with such a huge budget and popularity due to the novel.
Many other adaptations of the book were released but weren’t as popular as the 1939 movie, like The Wiz and Journey Back to Oz. Then, in 1995, a book was written titled “Wicked.” The book was written as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz and eventually inspired a musical Wicked in 2003 that was loosely based on the 1995 book. In 2024, the movie Wicked, directed by Jon Chu, was released as a movie version of the first act of the musical.
Despite the many different forms of this story that has been loved by generations since 1900, this 2024 film Wicked will always be a life-changing story of friendship, acceptance, and defying expectations and is a very welcome update to this familiar old tale.