Brush Up On Everything Happening in Oz Before ‘Wicked: For Good’ This Weekend

Brush Up On Everything Happening in Oz Before ‘Wicked: For Good’ This Weekend

[This story contains major spoilers fromWicked the movie and musical.] Wicked fans are ready to return to the wonderful land of Oz. The second film in Jon M. Chu’s two-part on-screen adaptation of the beloved Broadway hits theaters this Friday, almost exactly one year after Wicked was released. Wicked: For Good will see the witches…

[This story contains major spoilers fromWicked the movie and musical.]

Wicked fans are ready to return to the wonderful land of Oz.

The second film in Jon M. Chu’s two-part on-screen adaptation of the beloved Broadway hits theaters this Friday, almost exactly one year after Wicked was released. Wicked: For Good will see the witches of Oz — Ariana Grande‘s Galinda, aka Glinda the Good Witch, and Cynthia Erivo‘s Elphaba, aka the Wicked Witch of the West — continuing the story that began with the first film.

The first glimpse of Wicked: For Good came in the form of a CinemaCon 2025 poster. In the image, Erivo’s Elphaba looked right at home in her full “wicked witch” glory, while Grande’s Glinda resembled the Glinda the Good fans ofThe Wizard of Ozare used to. The poster’s tagline, “You will be changed,” is a reference to the iconic duet from the Broadway musical and inspiration for the film’s title, “For Good.” The song is one ofWicked‘s most recognizable after “Defying Gravity.”

Wicked, which arrived in theaters Nov. 22, 2024, had the highest opening for a musical adaptation with an estimated $114 million at the domestic box office. (Grande and Erivo, despite an unverified online rumor, were paid equal for their show-stopping starring roles; they even compared contracts.) The sequel film is tracking to open with $115 million-plus Thanksgiving week, according to prerelease tracking.

The films are based on the 2003 musical of the same name, which was originally based on the best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire. Wickedtells the untold story of thewitches of Oz. Winnie Holzman, the stage production’s book writer, wrote the screenplay for Chu’s movies with Dana Fox. Academy Award-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz adapted the musical for the screen. Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth originated the roles of Elphaba and Glinda on Broadway (and they appeared in surprise cameos during the “One Short Day” sequence in the first film).

Wicked ended with Erivo’s awe-inspiring performance of the stage show’s most well-known musical number, “Defying Gravity.” Since “Defying Gravity” served as the end of the Broadway show’s first act, this Wicked ending helped to usher in Chu’s vision to break Act 1 and Act 2 into separate films.

Chu’s Wicked stayed true to the stage musical, featuring little to no changes to the story’s overall plot. He told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the film’s release of the moviemaking process, “We knew we didn’t want to pull the movie away from the show so far that it wasn’t the show that I loved. We started talking about, what numbers can you cut to get it in? And the amount of numbers you have to cut to get this story in is just not plausible. You want all the songs, so you’re going to cut dancing. Which ones? Tell me which ones and we’ll do it. It just became very apparent that we had to make a choice. We went back and forth, are we making a three-and-a-half-hour movie that cuts off all these things? Are we doing one at a time? And if we’re doing one at a time, then we have to make sure that that movie is emotionally fulfilling so it doesn’t feel like we’re stopping in the middle of a story. … We all agreed that we were splitting it.”

He continued, “And we found that that room was necessary. Because if you’re going to, I don’t know, perhaps end on a ‘Defying Gravity,’ let’s say, then you have Elphaba that needs to be the most pivotal moment of her life. So then you need to set up Elphaba more than maybe the show does. You need to see what her childhood was like. … And how do you build that friendship? In the medium of movie, you call bullshit on things so fast, you have to have the time and the space to believe in that relationship. And you have a narrator of Galinda that wraps it all together, that sets up things for movie two. So all those things are just a lot, and I think we found a beautiful balance in it.”

Chu and the team shot both movies together “over 160 days and got stopped 10 days before finishing [because of the strike] our ‘Defying Gravity’ and flying days,” he told THR. The team finished up the 10 days of production at the beginning of 2024. As the movies were shot together, the cast remains the same for both films.

Wicked‘s second act takes a darker turn from the bright poppy moments in the first act. “Defying Gravity,” in both the stage musical and film, serves as the moment that Elphaba “transforms” into the Wicked Witch of the West that Wizard of Oz fans know, with the added context that the Wizard and her mentor, Madame Morrible, played in the film by Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh, respectively, have branded her “wicked” after she refused to help their plot to strip rights away from the animals in Oz. Elphaba and Glinda, who spent the first act and film becoming friends against all odds, go their separate ways as Elphaba chooses to rebel against the Wizard and Glinda stays behind.

Schwartz previously confirmed to THR that there are two new songs in Wicked: For Good. Erivo will sing “No Place Like Home,” while Grande will tackle a new track, “The Girl in the Bubble.”

“They were written because they were necessary for the storytelling. It’s why there isn’t a new song in the first movie because we didn’t need one,” Schwartz previously said to THR. “They’re an important part of the story.”

“The reason we even wanted to have new songs in the second part, and that’s the only thing I’m going to say about the second part, is because we had these ideas of songs that we kind of fell in love with, and as Dana’s saying, we couldn’t even have fit the whole score into one movie,” Holzman said, adding that any changes made to part one were made to “increase the intensity or increase the stakes” and never just because.

Holzman and Fox also weighed in on the Wicked spoiler debate, explaining why they aren’t concerned about fans potentially spoiling the second film. “It didn’t open yesterday, it’s been running for 21 years,” Holzman joked about the stage musical. “Not just in America, all over the place. It’s been touring and it’s been in a lot of languages. There are some answers in that you can know … If you gofind that out yourself, you can know those things.”

Still, she said she feels for the fans who are trying to avoid the spoilers: “I have to pay homage to people who are having their responses because that is what we wanted. Passion is beautiful. It shows how they gave their hearts.”