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Over the weekend I came across a hilarious post from a good old social media influencer titled ‘Before Wicked vs After Wicked’, in which he showed doubts about all the initial praise for the new film – with people saying to him: ‘He’s going to win the best. image!” and he exclaimed, “Can we all calm down for a moment, please?” – only to find him in tears in the theater at the end of the film, shocked and even irritated by how much he enjoyed it.

Well, that gave me a feeling mind-boggling as it completely reflected my trajectory over the past few weeks – many in my world, including a prescient and very knowledgeable member of my team at work, repeatedly told me how important and amazing this film was going to be, and I resisted.

However, I felt like I had a good reason for it: my mother recommended Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” to me sometime in the late 1990s, and I quite liked it, but when I saw the subsequent Broadway musical in the mid-1990s (in the front row, after winning the lottery), I remember feeling as if the story was being was curtailed and largely sacrificed in favor of the big theatrical musical numbers, only one of which I thoroughly enjoyed (yes, that would be “Defying Gravity” at the end of Act I).

Fast forward about 20 years to a “Wicked” screening last week, where I was amazed at how moved I was, how quickly the 2 hours and 40 minutes running time went by, and how beautifully the musical numbers I once wrote from felt turned out.

No, I’m not crying, you’re crying.

How did I get here? I wondered. There are several obvious reasons for the success of the Jon M. Chu-directed film: yes, Cynthia Erivo’s emerald face is like an open book full of emotions from the first frame to the last, and yes, all the different movements in the chemistry between Erivo and the two other leads – a delightful Ariana Grande and the dashing Jonathan Bailey – fly off the screen together and separately. Not to mention the breathtaking sets, high score and game supporting cast, including Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum and Bowen Yang.

‘Wicked’ was initially and always intended as a film

But there is another reason that is just as obvious. Even though I’m woefully uneducated in the field of Broadway lore, I did remember the story of the beginning of the “Wicked” musical, and how Maguire initially wrote the book with movie stars in mind (including Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas) . It was always his intention for the book to be developed into a film, and in 2021 he wrote in The Guardian that “the calls from Hollywood came within a week of publication.”

Universal began developing the film as a non-musical film, but Maguire recalled that they “didn’t get any satisfactory scripts” and that “the studio was afraid to pay $100 million to make a fantasy film without major male roles. ”

To put it in context, this was the mid-1990s, before the “return of the movie musical” and “Chicago’s” Best Picture Oscar-winning 2003. And then there’s Oscar-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, who won the Grammy Award. .com related an interview published last week in which he worked his way “up the Universal food chain to reach Mark Platt, who was running Universal Pictures at the time, and persuaded him not to do it as a movie – at least not well.”

Schwartz’s arguments for making it a theatrical music production instead made sense for Universal – it would require significantly less investment to finance a Broadway production than a big-budget tentpole film, and, as Maguire wrote, a non-productive production. musical “straight film will not touch the heart the way a musical does.” Clearly, songs would provide the central duo of witches, Elphaba and Glinda, with the perfect opportunity to transport the audience into their internal world.

Clearly, the success of the Tony-winning Broadway show and now the movie is a testament to the fact that he had the right instincts. And it took all that time – including the time before the glacial trends changed, allowing musicals (or even just musical moments) to appear virtually anywhere – to set the stage, so to speak, for this musical film to enter the chat in such a way ended up. memorable (and viral!) way.

But what’s also clear is that the elements the “Wicked” feature works with are undeniably cinematic.

While the original 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” was itself based on a book (L. Frank Baum’s 1900 work “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” to be precise), the film was a turning point in the cinema – one of the first major films to use Technicolor – and remains a cornerstone of the culture when it comes to family-friendly fare.

But it was even more than that, as the whimsical opening of the new ‘Wicked’ film demonstrates – minor spoilers ahead.

The opening images of the new film pick up right where 1939’s “Oz” left off – with the iconic pointy black hat on the ground in the middle of a puddle of water. As anyone familiar with the story of ‘Wicked’ knows, it explores the life of the Wicked Witch of the West from a different perspective, including a look at what happened before the famous events of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, to to reveal what made her ‘evil’ in the first place. So from that first, connecting image, it struck me that the new film celebrates – and even reveres – the extraordinary iconography of that classic character in a way that the musical simply could never do.

Of course, that’s not to say that the music production falls short in any way in celebrating and elevating Elphaba, it’s simply about focusing on a very specific, small and intimate detail, as a film camera can do, that invites viewers into a very another journey. . From that moment on I suspected I was in for something different and ultimately very exciting, and it turned out I was right.