The rise and fall of ‘Wicked’: It’s a good thing the sequel was snubbed by the Oscars
In the run-up to the release of Wicked in 2025, the whole internet was on fire, with endless memes featuring lead cast members Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sweeping every social media platform.
There was so much buzz around the film, almost as much as Barbie, with the movie’s widespread appeal to everyone from children and musical theatre obsessives to The Wizard of Oz lovers and Grande megafans, allowing it to become one of the most successful movies of the year. It grossed $758.8million, while toys and plans for theme park rides based on the film emerged in its wake. Even if you had no interest in Wicked, you probably came to be familiar with it in some capacity, its presence wholly inescapable and infiltrating.
It was a true pop culture phenomenon, even though, by most accounts, it wasn’t actually very good. Now, I know many people adored the film, which brought the world of Oz to life with expansive sets and dramatic costumes, but it looked flatter than a pancake. An attempt to bring a beloved musical to the big screen failed ot live up to the brilliance of the stage production, with the colours dull and lifeless in comparison to The Wizard of Oz’s beautiful Technicolour.
It looks more like a superhero film than a candy-coloured delight, which is what it should’ve been. John M Chu had the chance to make his film look like an actual dream, but instead, the characters appear washed out, and there’s this greyness to everything that just feels incredibly devoid of energy.
With its grating songs and a particularly ridiculous ending, which saw Erivo fly up into the sky and belt out the ‘Defying Gravity’ riff, it was far from being an example of brilliant filmmaking. I mean, for crying out loud, Chu’s past credits include Justin Bieber: Never Say Never and various Step Up movies. So, when Wicked actually bagged ten nominations from the Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’, it felt like a smack in the face to the really good movies it was competing against – and those that didn’t even get a look in.
If Wicked hadn’t had such a viral moment or scraped in so much money at the box office, there’s no way it would’ve been a contender at the Oscars. The mere fact that it was a huge, big-budget, star-studded spectacle of a movie was enough to garner it consideration, it seemed – the Academy really will choose image over substance. It won ‘Best Production Design’ and ‘Best Costume Design’, which is about all it was worthy of, let’s be honest.
With the sequel Wicked: For Good released in 2025, you’d expect that it would get at least a few Oscar nominations, even though the movie failed to perform as well as its predecessor; surely a few nods of Academy approval were likely to be on the cards. Grossing $524million this time around, everyone knew that the sequel couldn’t live up to the hype of the first film, but surely a few Oscar nominations would abound? But nope, not a single nomination has arrived for Wicked: For Good. And thank God.
Is this a sign of credibility that we’ve long needed to see from the Oscars? Sure, they’ve still hardly acknowledged female directors, but the Academy does seem to be making progress elsewhere, finally showing some more racial diversity across its nominations – that’s something, at least. There has also been increased representation for horror as well, with Sinners making history with a staggering 16 nominations. Not only has a horror movie rarely been nominated full stop, but no film has ever earned that many nods from the Academy before.
By refusing to acknowledge Wicked: For Good at all – no production design nomination, no acting nods, and a ‘Best Picture’ snub – it feels like we’re moving in the right direction. We don’t need these money-grabbing sequels, with Oscar-baiting emotional pull, all artificial and shiny Hollywood dramaticism, to earn nominations, because that’s not cinema. Wicked and its sequel are the musical equivalent of Marvel, and that doesn’t belong anywhere near movies like Sentimental Value.
So, we can all take a sigh of relief for the fact that Wicked: For Good has been completely ignored by the Academy. That’s the last thing we needed right now.
