Wicked: For Good Review

The first film had the easier act and the better songs, and Chu's second half inherits everything the stage show never solved. Act two of Wicked is a sequence of explanations: how the Tin Man got his tin, why the Scarecrow needs a brain, where the tornado came from, all of it serviced while a girl from Kansas wanders the edges of the frame, unseen. The film keeps cutting away from its own leads to attend to an older movie.

What it has is the two leads. Cynthia Erivo, singing No Place Like Home, one of two new Stephen Schwartz songs, does the most exposed work of either film. Ariana Grande gets The Girl in the Bubble and plays Glinda's complicity as something she chose, darker than the stage version allows. Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum are reduced to plot.

Reviewers split closer to the middle than before, 66 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 58 on Metacritic. Audiences gave it an A CinemaScore and a 147 million dollar opening, the biggest ever for a stage musical adaptation. The Academy shut it out entirely, zero nominations against the original's ten. A sincere, well sung finish to a show that was always front loaded.