Jon M. Chu’s musical Wicked (Part One), starring Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, is set to defy gravity over the coming weeks as the blockbuster event of the holiday season.
The first installment, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was an immediate success, with its first printing selling out entirely.
MGM was the first major studio to see the mass cinematic potential in Baum’s Oz.
Gone were the pastoral scenes of the American Midwest, the folksy dreamscape of Oz and Dorothy Gale’s enduring optimism.
What Maguire did was eliminate the problem of the classical version of Baum’s Oz and replace it with the harsh moral lessons, the political issues, the sex and the violence that Baum had avoided.
Over the next few weeks, Jon M. Chu’s musical Wicked (Part One), which stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, is expected to defy gravity as the holiday season’s biggest event. Based on Gregory Maguire’s fantasy novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the Broadway musical Wicked, which was adapted from Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s long-running Tony and Grammy Award-winning Broadway production, boasts a fan base that most Hollywood musicals can only hope to match.
Even though there were some fans of more recent theatrical musical adaptations and original works, such as Chu’s In the Heights (2021), The Color Purple (2023), Wonka (2023), and West Side Story (2021), none could match the Wicked phenomenon, perhaps with the exception of Cats (2019). Jokes notwithstanding, a variety of merchandise, Broadway reunions, album reissues, a 15th anniversary Halloween TV special, and, of course, the inherent IP familiarity of The Wizard of Oz (1939) have all helped to sustain and grow Wicked’s fan base.
The Wizard of Oz’s unquestionably iconic legacy and Judy Garland’s fame, mystery, and tragedy notwithstanding, Hollywood has long failed to find success in the works of author L. The fourteen-book Oz series by Frank Baum. While The Wizard of Oz continues to be a childhood classic and Wicked continues to gain popularity, studios have been struggling to adapt more Oz adventures to the big screen for almost a century, with the majority of their attempts performing only marginally better than The Wicked Witch of the East.
Early in the 20th century, fifty years prior to C. A. Narnia was introduced by Lewis in his Chronicles, long before World War I and the occasions that would influence J. R. . “R.”. Baum, who regarded himself as the contemporary counterpart of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, wrote the Land of Oz. Tolkien’s stories about hobbits and Middle-Earth were the most well-known in children’s fantasy literature.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the first installment, was an instant hit and sold out in its first printing. Baum quickly co-wrote a Broadway musical in 1901 that was aimed at adult audiences, and it debuted in 1902. Because of the book and musical’s success, Baum went on to write 13 more novels for the series. He was one of the first American writers to recognize the value and profitability of mixed media; his ideas for an Oz theme park were never realized. He established The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, a film production company, and wrote The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays. He also tried to adapt his Oz books using live actors, movies, and magic lantern slides. Baum could have been Walt Disney’s equal before Disney even made his mark with Mickey Mouse, but his creative pursuits outside of his books put him in such terrible financial shape that even the success of his books couldn’t pull him out of it. Even though Baum wrote the 14 Oz books and the 26 canonical novels that followed, the popularity of the books has rarely translated to the same level of success in adapted media.
Prior to Fleming’s film, Larry Semon directed The Wizard of Oz (1925), a silent film in which Semon portrayed the Scarecrow. The film significantly altered the original material and was poorly received by critics. In 1933, a short animated film that was nine minutes long and had little to do with Baum’s work came after it. The first big studio to recognize Baum’s Oz’s potential for mass cinema was MGM. Despite receiving positive reviews and receiving a few Oscar nominations, The Wizard of Oz was a box office bust when it debuted in 1939. When combined with a substantial marketing budget, the $2.08 million budgeted movie was the most costly production ever, and it would take another ten years for MGM to turn a profit from re-releases. Even though the history and production of MGM’s film are so extensive that many books have been written about it, what followed in terms of Oz adaptations and derivatives demonstrates that it hasn’t been nearly as easy to succeed in Hollywood as it seems.
MGM did not seek a sequel to The Wizard of Oz, even after the film became profitable and a theatrical institution. Even with the availability of pre-existing material, sequels were uncommon in this era, which may be partially to blame. Another factor might have been that the production of MGM’s movie was so problematic, costly, and caused negative health effects for many of the cast and crew that it wasn’t worth the risk or negative publicity to do it again.
Baum’s first book became common knowledge by 1956, and the other books soon followed. Although MGM kept the rights to some of the elements that were included in the movie, such as Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the elements from the books were available for purchase, and they were. Even though many of the adaptations have since been lost and forgotten by everyone but film and Oz historians, Oz was preserved from the Soviet Union films to the Japanese animated series.
Based on Baum’s second novel in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Filmation’s animated Journey Back to Oz (1972) was the first significant attempt by Hollywood to carry on Dorothy and her friends’ adventures. Despite featuring Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli as Dorothy’s voice, Mickey Rooney as the Scarecrow, and Margaret Hamilton, the original Wicked Witch of the West, as Aunt Em, the film’s theatrical release was a letdown, despite its success on television broadcasts a few years later. Journey’s lackluster reception in theaters can be explained by its placement between Robin Hood (1973) and Disney’s The Aristocrats (1970).
The Wiz (1978), a Sidney Lumet-directed and Joel Schumacher-written film based on the 1974 Broadway musical by Charlie Smalls and William F. Scott, was Hollywood’s next significant attempt. Brown and Luther Vandross together. With Richard Pryor as the Wiz, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Diana Ross as Dorthy, and Quincy Jones as musical director, The Wiz, a Black cultural retelling of The Wizard of Oz, seemed to have it all. Notwithstanding all of this, the movie was a critical and financial failure, with Ross receiving the harshest criticism for her performance, her age in relation to the classic Dorothy, and Oz’s gritty, industrial aesthetic—a far cry from the original’s technicolor matte paintings. Since The Wiz has developed a sizable cult following over the years and, as a personal aside, I was raised with it as a mainstay of Black theater culture, these criticisms appear to have stemmed from a disconnect between Black audiences and white critics.
This helps to explain why the majority of Baum’s Oz novels have not been adapted for the big screen. In 1954, Disney purchased the live-action film rights to all of Baum’s sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The idea for Return to Oz (1985) came about during a brainstorming session after the rights were threatened. Even though it was the product of greed, the film’s audacious, terrifying portrayal of Baum’s homeland has had a profound effect on millennial viewers. The third book in Baum’s series, Ozma of Oz, serves as the primary inspiration for Return to Oz, the only feature film directed by Walter Murch, who is best known for editing Apocalypse Now (1979). Dorothy Gale’s unwavering optimism, the folksy dreamscape of Oz, and the pastoral landscapes of the American Midwest were all gone. Dorothy, played by Fairuza Balk, who would go on to become famous as the archetypal ’90s goth girl in The Craft (1996), is instead sent to a sanatorium by her aunt and uncle, who think her incessant references to Oz are a hallucination. Dorothy runs away and almost drowns in a river that transports her to Oz while undergoing electroshock treatment.
Her old friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion, have all been reduced to stone, and she is being pursued by Wheelers, evil kidnappers who have wheels in place of hands and feet, in search of Princess Mombi, who wears the heads of her victims and wishes to add Dorothy’s to her collection. This delightfully crazy movie is what made me and many other horror movie fans even more devoted to the genre. As you might expect, the movie did not do well with critics or viewers who were hoping for a kid-friendly movie. Though it received an Oscar nomination for visual effects, Return to Oz was a box office bust and, like The Wiz, has since become a cult favorite.
When Oz made a comeback to the big screen, it would be 28 years later, and Disney would be behind the camera once more. Through 1996, all 14 of the original novels were in the public domain, and Disney had lost the rights to the books. Disney’s $215 million attempt to develop a new live-action franchise akin to Pirates of the Caribbean, Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), isn’t based on any one book. Instead, the prequel Oz the Great and Powerful, which takes place 20 years before the events of The Wizard of Oz, centers on con artist Oscar Diggs (played by James Franco), who is transported to the Land of Oz in a hot air balloon and becomes a hero.
In Oz the Great and Powerful, Theodora (Mila Kunis), a good-hearted witch with good intentions, is transformed into the Wicked Witch of the West after being tricked by her sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) into thinking that Glinda (Michelle Williams) is evil. This similar transformation occurs in both Maguire’s novel and the stage musical Wicked. The film undoubtedly features Raimi’s signature style and powerful performances, and reviews were generally positive. The movie even brought in almost half a billion dollars worldwide, making it a modest Disney success. Essentially, the issue was that Disney was counting on a billion-dollar hit similar to Alice in Wonderland (2010), and early box office results indicated that it would. Plans for sequels set before Dorothy’s arrival were shelved, and whatever had led Disney to assume that a property that had never been a huge box office success would become a billion-dollar hit was deflated.
With its Wicked big-screen adaptation, Universal now has the opportunity to draw in a larger audience and box office than any previous Oz movie, eleven years after Oz the Great and Powerful, and it may do so once more when Wicked Part Two opens in theaters in November. What’s the appeal, then, aside from a fantastic soundtrack and a well-liked Broadway production, which I would argue has a far smaller audience than the number of moviegoers expected to see the film in the upcoming weeks, considering the cost of local theater tickets? Why is Maguire’s revisionist history and the ensuing musical so much more alluring than other Baum novel adaptations?
Perhaps the issue with Baum’s adaptations is that, in contrast to The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia, they are essentially children’s books with straightforward morals about a fictional world devoid of romance, violence, or difficult lessons. Despite his instrumental role, Baum’s books have become an outmoded reflection of his worldview, which was both progressive (women’s suffrage) and barbaric (his call for the genocidal extermination of American Indians). Although it seems improbable that many studio executives in the 20th century would have been interested in Baum’s personal views and would have probably dismissed them as being out of date (which they weren’t), there is no denying that the swift changes that took place throughout the world following his passing indicated that a new genre of fantasy was required in order to more accurately depict the world.
To stay up to date, Oz had to change. However, those modifications, which were evident in The Wiz and Return to Oz, attempted to integrate and challenge the traditional ideas of Oz and Dorothy’s ideal self, causing conflict between the past and present. The harsh moral lessons, the political issues, the sex, and the violence that Baum had shunned were changed by Maguire, who did away with the problems of the traditional version of Baum’s Oz. He reimagined Oz in a way that may have had the same impact on recontextualizing children’s fantasy as Alan Moore’s Watchmen did on superhero comics, rather than changing it to suit his own purposes. In other words, he upgraded Oz to more accurately represent modern life and times.
The musical still rocks Baum’s world to its core, despite reducing some of the darker scenes, political issues, and explicit themes of Maguire’s book. This does not imply that Oz or the musical Wicked is inappropriate for young audiences; rather, it approaches these characters with a maturity that speaks to audiences of today who have grown up in a world of prejudice, misinformation, violent leaders, and persecution—a wicked, yet surprisingly beautiful, world.
Wicked offers a chance to revisit Oz in a way that resonates with many viewers who grew up developing a cult around The Wiz and Return to Oz and who saw the hints of Elphaba’s story just beneath the surface of Oz the Great and Powerful. It is up to each viewer to decide whether or not it meets those expectations. But at the very least, being able to take that chance is turning out to be really popular.
