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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 how he doubted the initial praise for the new film – and people told him so : “He’ll win best.” Image!” and he shouted, “Can we all please calm down?” – only to find him crying in the theater at the end of the film, shocked and even upset at how much he enjoyed it has.

Well, that gave me a feeling astonishing seen as it completely reflected my journey over the last few weeks – many in my world, including a forward-thinking and very informed member of my team at work, kept telling me how meaningful and wonderful this film would 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. It came to me sometime in the late ’90s and I quite liked it, but I remember getting around to seeing the Broadway musical that followed in the mid ’80s (in the front row after winning the lottery). left me feeling like the story had been boxed in and largely sacrificed in the service of the big theatrical musical numbers, of which I only really enjoyed one (yes, that would be “Defying Gravity” at the end of Act I).

Let’s go forward some 20 years to a “Wicked” screening last week, where I was amazed at how moved I was, how quickly the two-hour, 40-minute running time passed, and how great the musical numbers I once wrote were made of felt.

No, I’m not crying, you’re crying.

How did I get here? I asked myself. There are several obvious reasons for the Jon M. Chu-directed film’s success: yes, Cynthia Erivo’s emerald face is like an open book of emotions from the first frame to the last, and yes, all the different streams of chemistry between Erivo and Die The other two main characters – the adorable Ariana Grande and the dashing Jonathan Bailey – fly off the screen together and separately. And that’s not to mention the stunning sets, impressive score and supporting cast including Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum and Bowen Yang.

“Wicked” was originally and always intended to be a film

But there is another reason that seems just as obvious. Even though I’m completely new to Broadway stories, I remembered the genesis of the “Wicked” musical and how Maguire originally wrote the book with movie stars in mind (including Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas). He always intended to make a film of the book, writing in the Guardian in 2021 that, in fact, “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 spend $100 million making a fantasy film without major male roles.” .”

To put it into context, this was the mid-90s, before the “return of the movie musical” and “Chicago’s” Oscar win for Best Picture in 2003. There’s Oscar-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, who Grammy.com said in an interview published last week that he “worked his way up the food chain at Universal to get to Mark Platt, who was then running Universal Pictures, and convinced him to at least not do it as a movie.” “To make a film.” not immediately.”

Schwartz’s arguments for making it a musical theater production instead were spot on for Universal – financing a Broadway production would require significantly smaller investments than financing a big-budget tentpole film, and, as Maguire wrote, a non- Broadway film. Musical “A normal film won’t touch the heart like a musical.” It’s clear that songs would provide the central witch duo Elphaba and Glinda with the perfect opportunity to take the audience into their inner worlds.

The success of the Tony Award-winning Broadway show and now the film is clear evidence that he had the right instincts. And it took all of this time – including the time before glacial trends shifted and musicals (or just musical moments) could appear virtually anywhere – to set the stage, so to speak, for this musical film to become so popular Chat comes in a meaningful (and viral!) way.

But it is also clear that the elements with which the “Wicked” series works are unmistakably cinematic.

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

But it was more than that, as the bizarre beginning of the new “Wicked” film proves – minor spoilers ahead.

The new film’s opening images pick up right where 1939’s “Oz” left off – showing the iconic pointed black hat sitting on the ground in the middle of a puddle of water. As anyone familiar with the story of “Wicked” knows, it examines the life of the Wicked Witch of the West from a different perspective, including a look at what happened before the famous events in “The Wizard of Oz,” to show what made her “evil” in the first place. From that first, complementary image, it became clear to me that the new film celebrates – and even reveres – the unique iconography of this classic character in a way that the musical simply never could.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the music production hasn’t managed to celebrate and highlight Elphaba in some way. It’s simply about focusing on a very specific, small and intimate detail, like a film camera can, and which invites the viewer on a completely different journey. From that moment on, I suspected that I was in for something different and ultimately very exciting, and it turns out I was right.