‘Wicked’ was far from magical
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Hollywood has been defying box-office gravity this holiday season, thanks in large part to “Wicked," the movie version of the long-running Broadway musical. The film grossed more than $450 million worldwide in its first three weeks of release.
Along with a pair of other recent hits, “Gladiator II" and “Moana 2," the film is helping to salvage what has otherwise been a woeful year for the movie business. I have a warm spot in my heart for “Wicked." When the musical opened on Broadway in 2003, I was among the few theater critics who praised it. Though daunted by the new movie’s 2-hour, 40-minute run time (which amazingly only gets you to the show’s intermission, with part two coming next year), I finally trekked to my local multiplex for a weeknight screening.
The experience was far from magical. The Jon M. Chu-directed film is certainly a spectacle; the estimated $150 million production budget is evident.
And the ingenuity and wit of the original material—based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, imagining an origin story for the witches of “The Wizard of Oz"—does occasionally shine through. But mostly, the film struck me as an object lesson in what’s gone wrong with so much big- and small-screen entertainment these days. First of all, the bloat.
“Wicked" follows the stage show fairly closely but pads everything: Hyperextended production numbers. Even more back story for Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo), the green-hued future Wicked Witch of the West. Too much of Ariana Grande’s simpering as her goody-goody rival and roommate, Glinda.
Bloat is the abiding sin of our streaming age. Perfectly good two-hour movies, such as “Presumed Innocent" and “The Talented Mr. Ripley," get reinvented as
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