I want to address the elephant in the room when it comes to critique of Jon M. Chu’s directional choices in Wicked For Good, because it seems people automatically assume that if you critique him you hate the “the girls” when in reality, most musical fans like me just wanted it to be about “the girls” plural… you know, like the first movie.
He wasn’t a bad director, especially in the first movie, he was a fantastic one. However, when it came to the material of the second act it did show he was out of his depth. There needed to be world building, there needed to be scope- you have characters separated on different ends of the map, their influences not just being felt all over a university, but the entirety of OZ now. You need to set a stage for the choices both lead characters make by the end. For Glinda the story should be widening as the scope of her influences travel beyond her control and for Elphaba hers should be closing in- where we feel her loneliness her desperation setting the stage for her character to unravel when everything keeps going wrong. Without big dance numbers, and darker more grown up themes, he absolutely seemed to struggle to find the balance he hit in the first movie.
Yes, the story has always focused on the girls, where Jon Chu got a little lost in the sauce was how he perceived Glinda as the lead…not even joking.
Doing this will absolutely break the story from the musical. It will sever the connection to the plot since Glinda is isolated while Elphaba is very much driving the plot till her death where there should be hand over to Glinda as she becomes Glinda the Good. That’s okay because Jon also reasoned away the need for the plot to matter… (despite the second act of the stage musical being mostly all plot since the character building was set up in the first act.)
So now we are focusing on the girls and their relationship, but lets examine that for a bit, because adding the material they did hurt and muddied their characterizations let’s start with Glinda: who was self aware in the musical, her bubble had cracks in it right around the moment she sings the outro of Thank Goodness, and it burst the moment she watched her ex-fiance get brutally tortured despite her orders to the guards she outranked commanding them to stop. In the movie Glinda had the realization in Thank Goodness then somehow regressed into full brainwash mode enough to try to recruit Elphaba back into the regime that was trying to kill her. Some added Gelphie dialogue made it clear that the reason Elphaba was there was to force the Wizard into an ultimatum and not to steal Fiyero, where in the musical it would not be as clear to Glinda when she walked in on the scene, so here in the movie she should have a pretty good idea t was Fiyero’s choice but still suggests the same trap from the stage show while knowing Elphaba was as caught off guard as she was. Then after everything goes south in Munchkinland she still had not popped the bubble, after Boq spewing BS outside her apartment, still not popped, she had to sing a song about herself first, confront Morrible, and watch her best friend die to truly wake up and burst her bubble. That is not the well written character from the stage show, that is one that slept walked through most of the movie with her eyes closed, but hey those reshoots with little Glinda and the reintegration of the animals fixed everything, oh and she has magic now!!
I could get into how these decisions also hurt Elphaba, but since the director was genuinely uninterested in her character and her side of the story I’m going to pull a ‘Chu’ by ending this the same way he forgot about her here:
