Wicked & Wicked: For Good — 2024 / 2025
- Chris Barembruch
- Apr 9
- 4 min read
A Movie Review
By C.J. Barembruch | I Am Is and Was ™
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You think you know this story.
You have known it your whole life. The yellow brick road. The ruby slippers. The green witch in the castle. The good witch in the bubble. Dorothy. Toto. The curtain pulled back on the little man calling himself great.
You know the story.
Except you don't.
You know the version that was handed to you. The official version. The one told from the point of view of the ones who won.
Wicked — and its stunning conclusion Wicked: For Good — tells you the other version. The one that was happening behind the story you thought you knew. And what it reveals is something that lands far beyond the borders of Oz.
The villain was the hero all along.
And the good witch? She was carrying her own darkness. Just like the rest of them.
Elphaba — played with extraordinary power and vulnerability by Cynthia Erivo — is born different. Green skinned in a world that has already decided what green means. Misunderstood from her first breath. Gifted with a genuine magic that a corrupt system immediately recognizes as a threat. She is offered everything — power, acceptance, legitimacy — if she will only use that gift in service of the lie.
She refuses.
And the machine that could not own her decides to destroy her instead.
Glinda — brought to luminous, complicated life by Ariana Grande in a performance that will genuinely surprise you — is everything the world rewards. Beautiful. Agreeable. Pink. She learns quickly how to be what people want her to be. And she is good at it. So good that she almost loses herself entirely inside the performance.
These two women should never have been friends.
They become the most important relationship in the story.
Because the truth about both of them — the real truth, the one underneath the labels the world put on them — can only be seen by someone who loves them enough to keep looking past the surface.
Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard is exactly what a man who built his power on fear and illusion should look like — charming, plausible, and hollow at the center.
Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible is the kind of elegant evil that wears the face of a mentor until it doesn't need to anymore. Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero brings warmth and complexity to a role that could have been decorative.
But this is Erivo and Grande's story. And they carry it completely.
Now here is why these two films belong in your personal collection.
The story of Oz has always been a story about the outsider. About the one who doesn't fit. About what the world does to the person it cannot categorize and cannot control.
Dorothy is a gay icon not by accident. The original story — the yellow brick road, the found family, the desperate search for a place that feels like home — spoke to every person who ever grew up knowing they were different and not yet knowing why. Who loved the original version because somewhere in it they saw themselves.
Wicked takes that story and goes deeper.
It asks the question the original never asked.
What was it like to be Elphaba?
To be genuinely gifted. Genuinely good. Genuinely different. And to watch the world build a story about you that had nothing to do with who you actually were — and then decide to make you into the monster they needed you to be because the truth was too inconvenient for the people in power?
That is not a fantasy story.
That is the story of every person who has ever been labeled by a world that needed a villain and chose them.
The Wicked Witch was never wicked.
She was inconvenient.
And there is a very big difference.
These are two films. One story. Watch them in order. Watch them together if you can.
And then ask yourself — who in your own story has been cast as the villain by people who needed the narrative to go a certain way?
And is it possible — just possible — that the real story looks nothing like the one you were told?
Both films are available on Prime Video for rent or purchase.
Note: Amazon frequently rotates their library. Please check Prime at the link above to see if this is currently included with your membership at no extra cost.
Directed by: Jon M. Chu Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Colman Domingo
Rated: PG Runtime: Wicked — 2hr 40min | Wicked: For Good — 2hr 17min
Wicked Released: November 22, 2024
Wicked: For Good Released: November 21, 2025 | DVD January 20, 2026
Namaste. 👋
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