"Wicked: For Good" Review: A Sequel of... (?) Proportions

Our final trip down the yellow brick road could use some pep in its step.

November 25, 2025

It’s often said that everything happens for a reason, that we experience things in life to help us learn and grow, each one bringing something we must learn.

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I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that the worst thing any experience can be is nondescript. Triumphs build confidence and hardships build character, but mundane experiences do nothing but pass a clock-tick and fade into nothingness. We can apply to them no emotion or thought to make us feel our time was earned. As such, I cannot say that I am better for having seen Wicked: For Good, and I also can’t say I was changed for good. I became a few thousand clock-ticks older, and that’s about it.

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Is the Wicked sequel bad? No, but it’s predictable. This is not to say the story itself, because 22 years after its Broadway premiere, if you haven’t seen the musical, that’s your fault. It’s simply predictable as an entity. Even people who’ve never taken in a Broadway production could tell you most second acts feel like the dying breath of a great idea stretched beyond its means. We know characters that played profound roles in the first act sometimes disappear, never to find resolution. We know the musical motor exhausts its melodic stores, and the songs suffer.

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Yet, a change in medium offers a chance to correct what the stage fumbled. Relationships can be fully explored, and what was melodramatic can be refined with nuance. New songs can add fresh perspectives. Characters who exited stage left, never to return, can see their narrative resolved.

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Sadly, none of this happens. While the first film felt helplessly in love with its source material, the sequel seems almost resentful of it. The restrained cutesiness is appreciated, but the nonexistent urgency is not. If there’s a true story in the second film, this writer is still contemplating where along the way he lost it. Yes, things happen, but they feel no different than a hectic day at work. Showing events may fit the dictionary definition of a story, but not the spiritual one.

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The film’s issues can be narrowed down to one stretch: Fiyero, the gallant prince whose honor grows through his love for Elphaba, the erroneously-named Wicked Witch of the West, finally leaves Glinda, the semi-reformed bully and faux-magical godsend of Oz, and their engagement of convenience to be with his true love and aspire to a higher calling. Glinda, though momentarily devastated, fights Elphaba beside the Kansas farmhouse she inadvertently inspired the devious Madame Morrible to drop on Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose. As the two tussle, the Emerald City Guard appears and briefly restrains Elphaba before Fiyero (insincerely) threatens Glinda’s life, forcing the soldiers to stand down. Elphaba flees, but Fiyero is captured. Elphaba, having successfully retreated, casts a spell from the Grimmerie and saves Fiyero’s life by unknowingly turning him into the sexiest scarecrow who ever lived (which we discover later).

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In only several minutes, Glinda suffers a heartbreaking betrayal, vengefully suggests using Elphaba’s love for Nessarose to lure her out of hiding (accidentally causing the latter's murder), gives the dead Nessarose’s shoes to some rando, fights her former best friend who is then saved by Glinda’s very recently ex-fiancee, who is then tied to a post, beaten, and turned into a scarecrow.

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If that sounds like it should take up half an hour of rich character development and a stunning musical number instead of the approximately ten minutes it is given, that’s because it should have: a recurring theme throughout a very rushed yet bizarrely overextended second act.

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In that sense, Wicked: For Good very much feels like we’re Dorothy, a faceless non-entity mindlessly skipping down the yellow brick road. But where Dorothy has an ultimate goal and gets little side quests along the way, we get… well, nothing. We don’t get fun or funny, we don’t get theatrical or daring, and despite the end of the first film’s promises, the only thing Elphaba defies is the ability to not rip off Jonathan Bailey’s meddlesome clothes, which actually makes her one of the most relatable characters in modern film history.

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In reality, Wicked is likely too thematically ambitious for two movies or acts in a play, so only so much could be done. Still, in all the ways we can excuse something for what it could not help, we must condemn it for how it could’ve helped itself and didn’t. Could it have given Elphaba more agency by more thoroughly explaining how much time had passed from the end of the first film to the beginning of the second, thus layering the severity of her struggle against the Wizard and ensuring the movie wouldn’t need to be shouldered by Ariana Grande’s fantastic performance? Yes.

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Could it have explored the power of the Wizard’s propaganda machine so that Glinda easily dismantling them didn’t feel like a massive stretch of “long-lost daughter” syndrome, source material be damned, and therefore further legitimize the development of Glinda, Elphaba, and Fiyero? Yes.

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Of course, doing so would have necessitated riot-inducing cuts and additions that no studio would’ve approved, so, again, it’s not entirely the movie’s fault. However, if ifs and buts were candies and nuts, what a wonderful Christmas it would be. Sadly, we’re diabetic and allergic, respectively, so this movie is what it is.

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We must give credit where it is due. The vibrance issues of the first film have been corrected; Oz seems as colorful as ever. Grande is Oscar-worthy as she’s left by the screenplay to carry the entire movie on her tiny shoulders. While the songs are collectively weaker and more random, “For Good” is perfectly executed.

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Aside from that, there isn’t much to say. Rather, there is, but saying it feels pointless. Wicked: For Good does not inspire the depth of feeling necessary to dissect it beyond the bare minimum, which is frustrating. There are logic issues and plot holes aplenty, but why bother? Any other movie and this review would be twice the length, but this film is too banal to ignite that flame. Studies show we’re 5x more likely to complain than to compliment, but as humans, we need to do one or the other. We want our feelings and experiences to feel important and necessary. The worst thing anyone or anything can do is be a total nothing.

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So, what was the reason Wicked: For Good came into our lives? Because it had no other choice, because the first movie was made, because the musical was so popular, because someone wanted to turn light the dark fantasy of a book, because someone wanted to take Frank L. Baum’s classic story and make it twisty and cynical, because it just did. It happened because it was the next step in a long series of century-spanning events. It serves no purpose, sends no message, and tells no story. It isn’t a spectacle or meditation and doesn’t explore, expand, dissect, or distract. It’s just a thing that is, for no better or worse. So, let it be said and then never said again: Wicked: For Good is not a comet plucked from orbit, a seed dropped by a skybird in some distant wood, or a ship blown off its mooring. It’s a shoulder shrug, and no one is changed for having done one of those.