Weekend Watch: 'Wicked's' Spell, Then and Now

For Weekend Watch, you’ll find two recommendations: one timely pick tied to what’s new or returning, and one personal pick that may be less tied to the calendar but worth revisiting. Together, they’ll give you both something current to stream and something enduring to rediscover.

Wicked: For Good isn’t a sequel so much as the second half of a story given more room to breathe. The stage musical carries everything in one sweeping arc, but on film, director Jon M. Chu and his team split it in two so the emotional turns—the reckonings with power, identity, and the longing to belong—could actually land. If the first movie introduced Oz as a world shimmering with possibility and pressure, this chapter looks closer, noticing where the gloss has thinned.

We return to Glinda (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) after the choices they made in the first film pulled them apart. Elphaba, long treated as an outsider because of her green skin and untamed power, is no longer trying to shrink herself. She’s living with the truth that the world has always read her as a danger before it’s ever seen her as a person. Erivo plays her with a calm, steady fire—the kind that comes from realizing your difference is both a burden and a source of strength.

Glinda, who spent the first film floating on privilege, popularity, and the idea that goodness was something you could simply project, now stands as the kingdom’s polished ideal. Grande lets us feel the tremor beneath the shine: the worry that adoration can trap you just as tightly as judgment, only wrapped in applause.

Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero also reads differently now. His charm hasn’t gone anywhere, but there’s a new flicker of awareness—an understanding that moving through life without consequence can keep you from seeing what others have always had to shoulder. That shift softens his edges and adds a quiet ache to his connection with Glinda and Elphaba.

Chu’s direction is more patient this time. The beginning unfolds at a gentle pace, but once the story steadies, the shifts in the characters’ relationships land with more force. New musical numbers and smoother transitions bring the central tension into focus: in a world built on comforting illusions, what does it cost to be fully seen? Oz still dazzles, but there’s more weight beneath the glitter now—a sense of people trying to figure out who they are while the world keeps nudging them back into place.

As a continuation, For Good feels darker and more searching. It honors what the first film built while guiding each character toward the person they’ve been orbiting from the beginning. The result is a chapter that doesn’t just follow up the original—it brings the story’s deeper truth into sharp focus.

Wicked: For Good is in theaters now.

If you’re new to Wicked—either the film or the long-running Broadway musical—it helps to know that it’s a prequel of sorts to The Wizard of Oz. Before Oz becomes a battleground for power and mythmaking, it’s a campus where two young women arrive carrying opposite histories. Glinda has always been welcomed; Elphaba has learned to brace. Their early friction is bright and fizzy, but the slow recognition that forms between them is what gives the story its spine.

Around them, the kingdom is shifting: animal rights shrinking, the Wizard’s (Jeff Goldblum) charisma smoothing over harsher truths, and the line between admiration and manipulation blurring with every speech. Fiyero steps in with the loose-limbed ease of someone who’s never wondered whether he belongs, and the sparks he shares with both women become a quiet emotional undercurrent.

Then there are the moments that still make the film hum. Grande’s “Popular” is a burst of attitudinal ease—precise, funny, and buoyed by that exquisitely wide singing range she deploys like a knowing wink. It’s one of those performances that understands exactly what the number demands: charm with an edge, brightness with bite.

Erivo’s “Defying Gravity,” meanwhile, is the film’s emotional apex. She summons her entire being into that closing wail—it’s less a belt than an existential declaration. The moment lands not only because of its power, but because you can feel everything Elphaba has held for so long finally breaking free, lifted into something like truth made sound.

Watching the film again after Wicked: For Good gives the whole arc a richer resonance. Small gestures—a softened glance, a hesitant confession, the choice to reach out instead of retreat—suddenly feel like signposts pointing toward the people they’ll become. It’s a reminder that the process of becoming yourself rarely starts with fanfare; it begins quietly, in moments that only reveal their meaning later, when you’re finally ready to see them for what they were all along.

Wicked is available to stream on Prime Video.

Two chapters, one evolving friendship, and a world familiar enough to charm and welcome you in yet strange enough to unsettle you. Whether you’re revisiting Oz or stepping into it for the first time, this double feature offers color, humor, complicated loyalty, and characters who feel a little more real each time you return to them.