‘Wicked’ may have permanently ruined karaoke. Especially theater kid karaoke. This became certain when I threw a karaoke party for the ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Musical’ cast a week before the film’s release. It’s not just karaoke though, over the last few months my show choir and theater friends have worn me to the bone with the soundtrack, which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that I might’ve hated ‘Wicked’. People have said this is a hot take, but as I’ve jokingly said to those friends time and time again, “I just like good movies, it’s other people who like some good things and some bad things.” Art is subjective, and I can usually accept this, but this is different. 

Maybe “hate” is too strong a word. I didn’t hate ‘Wicked’, the 2024 film directed by Jon M. Chu, thats sequel film, ‘Wicked: For Good’ comes out in less than a year. I saw ‘Wicked’ opening night last November, and I cannot say I wasn’t skeptical. Despite being a fan of Chu’s previous work, the incessant marketing and the odd choice to split it into two parts had somewhat turned me off. However, I love musicals. I really do. So when I sat down in my seat at 6:30 on November 22, which was in between a flamboyant twenty-something-year-old man and two older women who had seen the show twice on Broadway, I was open to the idea of the movie winning me over. It did not do so, otherwise we wouldn’t be here today. As I said, not hatred, but I did however not enjoy myself for most of the (checks notes), two hour and forty minute (wow!) runtime. It’s not as if there weren’t some highlights. The two leads are admittedly fantastic singers and performers, and the scene that could officially make Jonathan Bailey a star, the Dancing Through Life number, is a rare moment when the film feels truly alive (more on that later)… Accepting all of those things that make the film not an absolute snoozefest, I must now turn to the negative. I don’t enjoy doing this, I truly don’t, so as a theater kid who’s had to deal with everybody calling him a “hater” for the last two months, I will make this brief: Almost every other performance seems like it was done in the spirit of getting a paycheck (Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh, both of whom I adore, are two shocking weak spots in the film), despite the Dancing Through Life number, all of the other numbers seem weirdly lifeless (I’ve never been a huge fan of the ‘Wicked’ soundtrack and the movie didn’t do much to change that), I could not care less about how the animals in Oz lost the ability to talk and the film hinges on that like it’s some kind of radical take on the source material (it’s less subtle than ‘Zootopia’!), the Defying Gravity number at the end is unfortunately so smothered in CGI and plot that it feels less climactic than much of the marketing that hinged on it, and much of the plot of the film (rarely the most important part of a musical) feels like fan fiction, something I don’t expect to get any better with part two. Okay. Is that it? Can I be done with that now? Great! I can be done criticizing the movie forever. At least until November 21, 2025. 

At the end of the day, art is subjective and it’s cool that different people feel differently about things. Although the film’s finale rang false for me, I can’t count on both hands the number of people I know who were driven to tears by it. I truly do enjoy seeing people going to movies and having an emotional response to them. What I don’t enjoy is when the general public’s consciousness seems so focused on one movie, especially when it’s one I feel the way I do about ‘Wicked’ about. It feels as though it’s been haunting me. In fact, the other day I was in Culinary and somebody behind me turned on their electric dough-hook and I swear it sounded exactly like the climax of Defying Gravity. That was after I found out that it was nominated for 10 Oscars (including Original Score?)… ‘Wicked’ might be haunting me. So what’s the solution to this? Well, when confronted with a problem about movies, the solution usually lies in other movies. 

Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the 1985 film, ‘Return to Oz’ which I first watched when I was about seven (it scared the bejesus outta me). I hadn’t seen it since then, until I decided to revisit it last year during a testing period in American Studies last year. 

What’s still striking to me about the film is how it’s pretty much the opposite of ‘Wicked’ in every single way. It’s no secret that Disney has always regretted not having ‘The Wizard of Oz’ as a part of its brand, so in the 80s when they acquired the rights to L. Frank Baum’s books they set out to make a sequel. Only they encountered the same problem that they (and Sam Raimi) would 28 years later with ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’; they didn’t have the rights for all the recognizable imagery, i.e., the ruby slippers (Universal holds onto those). So what they did was…interesting. 

First, they hired Walter Murch to direct. Murch, who, among other things, is one of the greatest editors of all time (like, he edited ‘The Godfather’) and ‘Return to Oz’ is the only feature film he ever directed. Second, ‘Return to Oz’ isn’t a sequel to the 1939 film, ‘The Wizard of Oz’, it’s a sequel to Baum’s original novel, and instead of aiming to be a nostalgia trip for the classic film, it is slavishly faithful to the books. And third, the movie is (and I say this with fondness) a nightmare. Less than fifteen minutes in, Aunt Em sends ten-year-old Dorothy to an institution run by an evil woman who intends to use shock therapy to “cure” Dorothy’s obsession with this made up place called Oz. Dorothy and her newfound friend then almost drown in a river in an attempt to escape the evil institute. Her friend seemingly dies. Then Dorothy then awakes in Oz, only it’s not the Oz she remembers. Every living creature has been turned to stone by an evil rock creature, including her friend the lion, whom she encounters and cries at the side of for a while, before a horrible creature called a “wheeler” shows up. That, and numerous other scenes (including one in which Dorothy literally walks through a hall of human heads) make for a film that it’s hard to imagine any child wouldn’t find deeply upsetting. 

So why have I been thinking about this thing so much? Well, because it might be the antidote to the ‘Wicked’ fever that I’ve been suffering from. Here me out. The 1939 film is a masterpiece and since its release there have been countless attempts at trying to capitalize on its greatness, but there’s been one major issue present with all of them; they’ve all been extremely safe and that is one thing that the 1939 film was never. It famously cost a ridiculous amount, was miserable for everybody involved to make, and underperformed at the box office. And yet—it’s one of the best movies ever. Despite the splitting of ‘Wicked’ into two parts, Jon M. Chu’s film does feel undeniably safe and…afraid? The same thing applies to Raimi’s ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’ and all of the other Oz adaptations since 1939. Except—for ‘Return to Oz’. Nothing about that movie feels safe. I can’t call it…good (although I do think it’s genuinely better than ‘Wicked’), but there’s something exhilarating about a movie literally greenlit to capitalize on nostalgia, figuratively spitting in the eye of anybody who might be looking for something like that. Nothing like it will ever get made again most likely, especially an adaptation of a brand so familiar and beloved. That’s gotta be worth something. 

I really don’t take that much pleasure in disliking (or “hating on”) ‘Wicked’. I take much more pleasure in telling people about ‘Return to Oz’.