So, here it is. Another glossy dispatch from the Emerald City. The marketing machine for Wicked: For Good has produced a new banner, and it's about what you'd expect. The five principals—Elphaba, Glinda, Fiyero, Madame Morrible, and the Wizard himself—stand assembled, bathed in that familiar emerald glow. They look less like characters caught in a dramatic upheaval and more like they're posing for a very expensive corporate retreat photo. Clean. Composed. Perfectly lit. Everyone hits their mark on the Yellow Brick Road, surrounded by an immaculate, flower-strewn Oz.
It's an image designed to reassure, to project confidence. Look, it says, all your favorites are here, ready for the grand finale. But this kind of pristine, airbrushed marketing always gives me pause. Cinema, at its best, is about messy, complicated humanity. This poster is about selling a product.
And what a product it is. The second half of a billion-dollar gamble, picking up after the first film dutifully set the stage last year. Now we get the payoff, or so they promise. Elphaba is in hiding, branded the Wicked Witch of the West. Glinda is the smiling face of a corrupt regime. And the chasm between them is about to swallow up everyone they hold dear—Fiyero, Boq, Nessarose. It's the story we all know, the one that's been packing theaters for two decades. The question was never what would happen, but how Jon M. Chu would stretch it across nearly five hours of cinema.
The first part felt like a long, elaborate prologue. This second part, For Good, is where the actual story lives. Glinda, haunted by her choices, tries to broker peace between Elphaba and the Wizard. It will, of course, fail spectacularly. Then there's the wedding to Prince Fiyero, an addition for the film that I suppose is meant to heighten the glamour and the eventual tragedy. And into this powder keg drops a girl from Kansas.
Chu has spoken of wanting to “make more sense of how it impacts our girls.” One certainly hopes so. Splitting a story in two is a precarious business. It worked for Dune because the source material was dense enough to demand it. For others, it has often felt like an exercise in padding, a way to get two ticket prices for one story. The burden is on Wicked: For Good to prove its runtime is earned, not just calculated.
Perhaps the most interesting wrinkle is the addition of new music. Stephen Schwartz, back at the piano, has penned two new songs: one for Elphaba, one for Glinda. That's something. A genuine artistic expansion, not just a narrative one. It suggests an attempt to deepen the emotional core, to give Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo something new to sink their teeth into beyond the iconic score. It's a move that feels less like a studio note and more like a creator trying to get the last word on his own masterpiece.
This new banner shows us the players. But the real story isn't about them standing together; it's about them being torn apart. As the mob rises and Dorothy's house falls, the film will live or die on whether we still feel the ache of the friendship that started it all. Can they make us feel it, after all this time and all this spectacle?
We'll find out when the curtain rises for the final time. They promise to change Oz for good. A noble goal. Let's see if the film does the same for the two-part blockbuster finale. I'll be there, but I'm not holding my breath.
