Wicked: For Good (2025)

Wicked: For Good arrives as the second half of a two-part adaptation of a stage musical that was itself a revisionist reading of a 1900 children's novel, which means the lineage runs three layers deep before anyone sings a note. Jon M. Chu directs with the confidence of a man handed unlimited tulips and a real yellow brick road. The result is lavish, tuneful, and quietly furious about the machinery of power. Oz is a propaganda state. The Wizard is a fraud with a press office, and Madame Morrible writes the headlines.

On the cultural ledger, the film is well provisioned. Cynthia Erivo anchors the production as a Black woman in the title role, surrounded by Michelle Yeoh, Colman Domingo, Bowen Yang, and Marissa Bode, who uses a wheelchair and whose character has been rewritten to shed the ableist framing of the stage version. The friendship between Elphaba and Glinda carries real weight, and the two women drive the plot while the men mostly posture. The persecution of the Animals functions as an unsubtle allegory for systemic racism, complete with forced labor, scapegoating, and state propaganda. The Wizard's corruption reads as authoritarian more than economic, though the elite still hoard the microphone. The moral instruction arrives through song, which is a gentler delivery system than a lecture, if not a shorter one.

Absent from all this is any explicit queer storyline, environmental theme, body-positivity message, or neurodivergent character. The film has other business. It is a fantasy about who gets to write the history and who gets blamed for it, and it conducts that business with a straight face and a 125-piece orchestra. A serious vintage, competently decanted.