Wicked: For Good has finally hit theaters, marking the conclusion of the Wicked adaptations, which split the iconic musical’s two acts into separate films. 2024’s Wicked was a global phenomenon, earning positive reviews from critics, becoming a box-office hit, and earning 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. It very much matched the spirit of the musical Wicked, which hit Broadway two decades ago. Yet,before the two feature films and even before the musical, there was an attempt to make a Wicked movie in the 1990s, following the publication of the book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Can you imagine Wicked without the songs? Well, it almost happened with many actresses, including Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, and Salma Hayek, trying to adapt the movie before Universal Pictures eventually opted to develop it as a musical play for Broadway. Had the feature film gone through, Wicked, as fans know it, might not exist, and the revisionist Wizard of Oz tale might be a pop culture footnote.
Demi Moore’s Attempt to Adapt the Original ‘Wicked’ Novel
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was published in 1995. Written by Gregory Maguire, the novel offered a revisionist take on The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch’s point of view, here given the name Elphaba. The book explored the idea of how narratives frame a person as “evil” and tackled terrorism and propaganda through the seemingly wonderful world of Oz, plagued by a totalitarian regime. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was an instant hit upon its release, and the film rights became a hot commodity.
Demi Moore and her production company, Moving Pictures, had optioned the film rights to Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West for Universal Pictures. Moore and Moving Pictures had actually beaten Whoopi Goldberg and her production company for the rights, as Goldberg was a fan of the novel. Other actresses who expressed interest in adapting Wicked included Claire Danes, Laurie Metcalfe, and Salma Hayek, with Hayek later attempting to develop Wicked as a television miniseries based on the book in the 2010s.
Moore was set to play Elphaba, who at this time had starred in successful films like Ghost, A Few Good Men, and Indecent Proposal but was also coming off some notable flops like The Scarlet Letter and Striptease. At this point, the eventual producers of the Wicked film, Marc Platt and Suzanne Todd, joined the project. Reportedly, Michelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson, and Nicole Kidman were being eyed to play Glinda. Linda Wooverton, at the time best known for writing Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, was hired to pen the script, with Back to the Future and Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis circling the project. Woovertoon’s script was very close to the tone of the original book, a much darker tale than what the eventual musical would become.
Troubles With the Movie Eventually Led to the Musical
Another interested party who wanted to adapt Wicked was Stephen Schwartz, who thought the book would make for a great musical. Interestingly, before the stage play, Linda Woovertoon expressed interest in turning Wicked into a musical film following her history with Disney animated feature films. At the time, Schwartz was also the lyricist for the music of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which happened to star Demi Moore as Esmeralda. Moore does not actually sing Hunchback; instead, Heidi Mollenhauer provides the character’s singing voice in “God Help the Outcast.”
By 1998, Schwartz had convinced Universal Pictures and the studios’ then-head of production, Marc Platt, to pause development of a feature film. Instead, he pitched them on making a musical stage play, one that, if successful, could serve as the basis for a feature film adaptation. The rest is history. Wicked opened on Broadway in 2003 and has since become the fourth-longest-running musical, with its songs becoming iconic. In 2011, Universal Pictures began its long journey to adapt the musical Wicked for a feature film, which finally materialized in 2024 with Wicked. By a strange twist of fate, Cynthia Erivo was nominated for Best Actress in the same year as the original actress set to play Elphaba, Demi Moore, who was nominated for The Substance that same year.
Wicked As We Know It Today Might Not Exist
The idea of a Wicked film closer to the original novel is a fascinating thought experiment. What direction would it have taken? Fantasy movies in the 1990s were certainly a mixed bag, and the genre wouldn’t explode back into mainstream popularity until 2001 with the dual release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Would Wicked have pitched itself as a lavish epic literary adaptation the same way as Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Interview with the Vampire? Would it be selling audiences as more of a dramatic remake of The Wizard of Oz, similar to Hook being a sequel to Peter Pan, playing off the visual imagery of the Disney animated film? It would be a very different adaptation from the musical or the two recently released films. That isn’t bad per se, but it is hard now to look back and see what would have been lost had the film gone through.
It’s difficult to say how the Demi Moore Wicked film could have impacted the musical’s existence. After all, Broadway is filled with musical adaptations of popular musicals, from Beetlejuice to Mean Girls. The Lion King opened on Broadway three years after the feature film hit theaters, so Wicked, the musical, still could have been released in 2003 if the movie had been released in the 1990s. Yet there is also a chance that the musical would not have happened, had the film put off wider audiences from the story with a mishandled tone. What is Wicked without “Defying Gravity”?
As thoughtful and exciting as the 1995 novel is, the musical has eclipsed it in popularity. The stage adaptation might not dig as deeply into the themes as Maguire’s novel, but the play certainly enriches the characters beyond being archetypes, particularly for Elphaba and Glinda. The decision to make Boq the Tin Man and Fiyero the Scarecrow might seem contrived due to the limited space in a musical, but in the end, it enriches and deepens the story, tying those characters to a larger, more personal story.
Had the original feature film plans taken off, it is unclear if Wicked, as a property, would be as well-regarded as it is today. The musical’s popularity led to more Wicked novels. The first sequel, Son of a Witch, hit bookshelves in 2005, two years after Wicked opened on Broadway. Since then, it has become a long-running book series. In the end, it all worked out for the best that the original movie plans didn’t pan out, as it led to the creation of the musical that has been delighting audiences for over twenty years and whose magic won’t be fading away anytime soon. Not to mention the films.
- Release Date
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November 22, 2024
- Runtime
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160 Minutes
- Writers
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Gregory Maguire, Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox, L. Frank Baum