November 21, 2025 · Watch the official trailer
Whenever a film doesn’t live up to audience expectations, it’s always disappointing, yet there’s something extra bittersweet when a genuinely high-quality film sees its inevitable encore completely ruin the momentum.
Whatever good will director Jon M. Chu built with his Oscar-nominated 2024 musical “Wicked” – which extended and chronicled the first act of the smash-hit Broadway musical – is completely and utterly destroyed by frustratingly poor decisions in its 2025 follow-up, “Wicked: For Good.”
Debuting this past weekend in theaters at almost twice the running time of the second half of the Broadway show, “For Good” picks up almost immediately after Elphaba leaves Oz in disgust at the Wizard’s actions, inciting a series of events that are meant to tie in classic “Wizard of Oz” imagery – the tornado, the shoes, the girl from Kansas – while steering the story toward the inevitabilities audiences have been waiting for.
Chu’s direction of “For Good” is so strangely, bizarrely inept that it outright makes both of its lead performers look worse from a visual standpoint.
Everything audiences may have loved about the original “Wicked” seems to be tossed onto the trash heap, as the bright, saccharine-sweet aesthetic of Oz Chu created to dazzle viewers in 2024 has been muddled into harsh shadows, upsetting grays, and deep blacks that literally hide characters’ faces in key musical moments.
It leaves an already difficult-to-see Cynthia Erivo – hidden under heavy makeup – almost completely unrecognizable. Any sort of magical trick to produce even basic front lighting is tossed aside, and a film franchise known for its theatrical production design is instead overly slathered in CGI.
And while “For Good” may not be the worst movie of 2025, it is without question the worst-shot movie of the year, with inexplicable, inexcusable decisions made by Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks, resulting in an unequivocally lesser follow-up to the 2024 smash.
Shockingly, “For Good” simply isn’t fun, and the clearest evidence of that is the muting of Ariana Grande’s Elle Woods–esque turn as Glinda the Good Witch.
The cheery affability and sly snark that made her a scene-stealing presence – and a legitimate Best Supporting Actress contender – in the 2024 film becomes mired and bogged down in angst, dimming her light completely. There’s a dystopian heaviness to the morality-play framing of “For Good” that makes the entire project less interesting to watch, and in the process sidelines Grande’s ability to offer any levity in moments that desperately need it.
Chu’s insistence on isolating performers for their solo songs largely ruins the kinetic energy that both the Broadway musical and the first film had, though it occasionally works for Grande, especially in the newly added song “The Girl in the Bubble.”
Erivo, on the other hand, is even further saddled by Chu’s inability to put her in a position to succeed, as the expressive anguish her Elphaba feels in several of the musical’s rich songs from Stephen Schwartz is played straight to camera on a green screen and loses the emotional weight it might have had if Erivo were singing to another performer.
Audiences are going to “For Good” to hear iconic songs staged eighteen-plus feet high, and yet the urgency that the dynamic musical numbers had in the original is completely absent in the follow-up. There isn’t an aerobatic, captivating number from Jonathan Bailey like “Dancing Through Life,” nor the quirky, combative duets Grande and Erivo faced off in with “What Is This Feeling?” or “Popular.”
Even the titular song of the film, while majestically sung by two incredible performers, is largely hidden and requires no visuals to feel the emotion of the characters.
Erivo is ultimately more hurt by these choices than Grande because Glinda arrives in “For Good” as a more fully realized character from the original film. Consequently, Erivo’s Elphaba is left without a clear emotional through-line, and that lack of motivation shows in the performance outside of the musical numbers. Without strong scene partners, purposeful staging, or coherent dramatic stakes, she’s forced to play broad emotions in a vacuum.
The film’s supporting characters, who were given ample time for development in the nearly three-hour original, feel completely empty here, with both Bailey and Ethan Slater given no opportunity to be successful.
“For Good” relies far too heavily on a less entertaining turn from Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard and a horribly miscast Michelle Yeoh to be the film’s antagonists, and yet despite a nearly 140-minute runtime, nothing tangible seems to happen.
Last year’s “Wicked” was nominated for ten Oscars, winning for both costuming and production design, though it seems highly unlikely that “For Good” will come anywhere close to the same level of success. Its production work, while strong in many of the technical categories as a continuation from the original, is so obscured by the directorial and cinematography decisions that it can’t be viewed as a strong contender almost anywhere, despite likely being one of the ten Best Picture nominees.
Ultimately, “For Good” misses the point of “Wicked.”
Chu systematically sucks the lifeblood out of the musical, removing the joy and excitement, drenching the film in darkness like a wet blanket, and leaving a befuddling mess that feels overly hollow and empty.
While viewers will certainly head to the big screen to catch the conclusion to last year’s smash hit, “Wicked: For Good” hasn’t been changed for the better.
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