Wicked: For Good. Darker… and Better?

Let's get straight into it: “Wicked: For Good” (2025) is what happens when a studio accidentally lets the second act out of its cage and it promptly eats the first film’s homework.

Where Wicked (Part One) was a lush, sparkly origin story with training wheels, For Good is the bit where the wheels come off, the government panics, and the propaganda department starts working overtime. It’s darker, knottier, and far more interested in the cost of being “good” than in selling Glinda-pink merch. That tracks with what was always true of the stage show’s Act II, and Jon M. Chu leans all the way into it.

By comparison it is much darker than the first. The Emerald City now looks less like a luxury theme park and more like a high-budget surveillance state. The yellow brick road feels less like a tourist trail and more like infrastructure for an empire. The film really sits in the consequences of Part One: the scapegoating, the militarisation, the way a “wicked witch” makes a very convenient distraction from structural injustice. The politics are still PG, but they’re no longer coy.

Chemistry: finally, two witches, one film

The big upgrade over the first movie is emotional chemistry. Where Part One sometimes felt like two separate star vehicles occasionally bumping into each other, For Good understands that the entire project lives or dies on the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda. Here, it lives.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande feel like they’ve actually known each other for years now – which, to be fair, they sort of have, both on and off screen. Their scenes crackle with that horrible, gorgeous energy of a friendship that’s half soulmate, half ideological car crash. Every time they share the frame, the film lifts about three feet off the ground.

The script still has to juggle a lot of legacy business – scarecrows, lions, tin men, flying monkeys, the whole extended Ozian HR file – but this time the camera knows where our eyes want to be: on those two faces, trying and failing to forgive each other and themselves.

Erivo, in particular, is unreal.

Her Elphaba has gone from misunderstood student to full-blown political problem, and Erivo plays her like someone who has finally stopped apologising for taking up space. The voice, obviously, is ridiculous – she treats the score like it personally wronged her and she’s here to exact vengeance – but it’s the stillness that lands hardest. There are close-ups where she’s doing more with a small adjustment of the jaw than most blockbusters do with an entire third act.

The film also gives her more non-musical room to breathe: quieter scenes of planning, hiding, grieving. She carries the weight of a movement on her back, and you can see the toll in every choice. It’s the kind of performance that makes the CG around it feel like it’s there to keep up with her, not the other way around.

Grande, for her part, has relaxed into Glinda in a way that feels less cosplay, more character. She leans into the discomfort of being the regime’s sparkly spokesperson, and the film lets us watch her realise that platitudes won’t fix a police state. Their climactic duet (no spoilers, but you know exactly which one) becomes less a farewell ballad and more a political eulogy for who they might have been in a better world.

Visually, For Good is a flex. Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks double down on the late-stage-capitalist storybook aesthetic from the first film and then corrupt it.

Emerald City is still a fever dream of chrome and neon, but there’s something rotting under the glitter now: harsher lighting, more shadows, banners that look one goose-step away from a real-world dictatorship. The skies are busier, the frame denser; it feels like Oz has filled up with spies, rumours and bad decisions.

The set-pieces are more coherent this time too. The magic has weight and geography – when Elphaba cuts loose, you feel the air shift. There’s one sequence involving a storm, a familiar house, and a very stressed out populace that manages to be spectacular without losing the human scale. And the way Chu stages the big musical numbers actually trusts the performers: longer takes, fewer frantic edits, more “yes, we know you bought a ticket to watch these people sing.”

The VFX are still, occasionally, a bit “prestige streaming series with delusions of grandeur,” but when it all lines up – sweeping camera, full orchestra, two women belting like their lives depend on it – it’s shamelessly, gloriously extra. And frankly, in 2025, if you’re going to spend $150 million on fantasy, I’d rather it be this than another beige reboot of a toy line.

The darkness isn’t just aesthetic eyeliner. The film dives harder into state violence, propaganda, and how easily “goodness” gets weaponised as a brand. The Wizard’s regime leans fully into authoritarian theatrics; Glinda becomes a walking press conference; Elphaba is the convenient Other who makes everyone else feel virtuous. It’s not subtle, but neo-fascism rarely is, and there’s something satisfying about a blockbuster musical being this blunt about it.

What’s clever is that For Good doesn’t completely absolve Elphaba either. Her rage is righteous, but her tactics are messy, and the film isn’t scared to show that. Both women are compromised, just in different directions. The moral universe is actually more complex than the original Wizard of Oz, which is… not a high bar, but still.

Does it all work? Not entirely. Being the “second half” of an already long story, the pacing still gets occasional whiplash: some subplots feel rushed, others hang around like they’ve paid rent. A couple of the Oz lore boxes are ticked in ways that feel more contractual than organic. And, because this is franchise cinema, there are moments where you can feel the film elbowing you in the ribs going “look, look, it’s the thing you recognise from 1939!” when you’d rather stay with the characters you’ve just emotionally invested in.

But when it focuses on its core – two women trying to be ethical in a system designed to punish anyone who is – it’s genuinely moving. And in those stretches, the film isn’t just better than Part One; it’s better than it strictly needed to be.

Wicked: For Good is bigger, moodier and thornier than its predecessor, with stronger chemistry and a central performance from Cynthia Erivo that frankly shouldn’t be allowed under workplace safety laws. It occasionally buckles under the weight of tying up lore and pleasing every quadrant of the fanbase, but when it lets its witches and its politics take centre stage, it soars.

The Emerald City may still run on lies, but this sequel at least tells the truth about what they cost.

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