Wicked

Universal Pictures and Marc Platt Productions bring Wicked to theaters on October 16, 2024, adapting one of the longest-running and most commercially successful Broadway musicals of the past two decades into a wide-release film. The story, set in the land of Oz before the events most audiences know from The Wizard of Oz, centers on two young women at Shiz University: Elphaba, a green-skinned outcast who will eventually become the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, the privileged, socially adroit student who will become Glinda the Good. The film traces the arc of their unlikely friendship and its gradual fracture as each moves toward the role history — or rather, legend — has already assigned her.

The source material requires little introduction to anyone who has spent time near a theater marquee since 2003. The stage musical has run continuously on Broadway for over two decades, generating a devoted international audience and a catalog of songs that have become genuinely inescapable in certain cultural registers. Adapting a property with that kind of embedded loyalty is a particular kind of challenge: the audience knows what they want to hear and see, holds strong opinions about how it should sound, and will notice any deviation. Film musicals adapted from stage productions have had uneven fates in recent decades — some translations have honored the form and found new audiences, others have struggled to justify the move from proscenium to screen. Wicked arrives at a moment when the film musical is neither moribund nor obviously ascendant, making its commercial and artistic position genuinely difficult to predict in advance.

Marc Platt, one of the film's producing studios, has a direct connection to the Broadway production, having produced the original stage show. That continuity of stewardship is at least worth noting: this is not a case of a property being handed off entirely to parties unfamiliar with its history. Whether that familiarity leads to a faithful translation or to a reluctance to make the kinds of structural changes that screen storytelling sometimes demands is a question the film itself will answer.

What the available information establishes about the story is relatively clean in outline: two women, a university setting, a friendship under pressure, and a trajectory toward two mythologized identities. The dramatic engine of Wicked has always been the revisionist impulse — the suggestion that the villain of a familiar story has a perspective worth hearing, and that the hero's goodness is more complicated than legend admits. That premise has obvious theatrical appeal, and it translates readily into the drama and fantasy genre categories the film occupies. The romance classification in the metadata is worth sitting with briefly: the central relationship in Wicked is most precisely a friendship, one with the intensity and eventual pain of something more, and how the film handles the emotional register of that bond will matter considerably to audiences who know the show well.

Several practical questions hover over the release without clear answers from the available materials. The film is listed as the beginning of a collection — a "Wicked Collection" — which suggests the producers intend to split the story across more than one film, a common strategy with long source material. The Broadway show runs approximately two hours and forty-five minutes, which is substantial but not unprecedented for a single film. If this first installment covers only a portion of the full narrative, the degree to which it functions as a self-contained experience rather than an extended first act will shape audience reception significantly. A film that ends in a way that feels deliberately incomplete can frustrate even the most enthusiastic viewer, and the trade-off between fidelity to the full story and the demands of a satisfying standalone theatrical experience is a tension the production will have had to negotiate.

The critical reception reflected in the available scores — an 88 on Rotten Tomatoes, a Metascore of 73, and an IMDb rating of 7.4 across nearly 192,000 votes — places the film in solidly positive but not rapturous territory. Those numbers suggest a film that landed well with critics and audiences without quite achieving the consensus enthusiasm that turns a release into a cultural event. The TMDB vote average of approximately 6.9 across a smaller sample tells a broadly similar story. This is not, by the numbers, a disappointment, but neither is it a film that appears to have silenced skeptics or converted those indifferent to the genre. For a property with the built-in expectations of Wicked, that middling-positive outcome is itself a kind of result worth acknowledging.

For those already in the audience for this material — theatergoers who have seen the show, parents who have watched children discover the soundtrack, anyone with an affection for fantasy-inflected drama and large-scale musical storytelling — the film is clearly the primary event. It is now available for streaming on Peacock Premium and Peacock Premium Plus, with rental and purchase options across Amazon Video, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, and Fandango At Home, making it accessible across essentially every major platform. For viewers new to the story, the Oz mythology provides enough familiar scaffolding that the revisionist premise — that the Wicked Witch was something other than simply wicked — requires no prior homework, only a willingness to sit with a more ambiguous account of a story that once seemed settled.