Wicked forever: the enduring appeal of The Wizard Of Oz

Most of the biggest streaming services are notoriously neglectful of any movie released before the 1990s (and in some cases, before the turn of the millennium). Even the big theatrical nostalgia screenings are starting to creep into the 21st century, as movies that, to the older among us, don’t seem ready for a multi-decade anniversary. (Did Batman Begins really just turn 20?! Is Mean Girls seriously old enough to drink?) So it’s all the more impressive that one of the hottest properties of the past few years has been ... The Wizard of Oz, a movie far closer to its 100th anniversary than its 25th. Of course, The Wizard of Oz as (shudder) intellectual property dates well before the 1939 release of the beloved MGM musical. L Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at the turn of the previous century, in 1900. It spawned 13 increasingly eccentric sequels, which Baum wrote with what seemed like some reluctance right up until his death in 1919. His final Oz book was published posthumously, and the series continued on without him. Related: Wicked: For Good review – Cynthia Erivo sweeps the field in explosive second chunk of Oz prequel But no one is ever talking about the Oz book series when they refer to The Wizard of Oz. In fact, apart from a few oddball borrowings and the half-terrifying, half-tedious Disney adaptation Return to Oz, most of this material has gone ignored by film and TV. The 1939 Victor Fleming-directed movie starring Judy Garland, however, seems bigger than ever – literally, in the case of its engagement at the Sphere in Las Vegas. For this immersive venue used largely for mind-melting concerns, the movie has been both shortened (by 25 minutes, down to a skeletal 75) and extended (by AI technology, expanding the frame to fill the cavernous digital screen). Despite controversy about the changes, the attraction (let’s not call it a film, per se) is a smash, by some estimates making around $2m a day. It boasts higher ticket prices than a normal movie, but still: grosses at that level for just a few months would make it bigger than most traditional films from 2025. If it plays for a year, it could hit James Cameron territory. That would also put it in striking distance of global grosses for a Wicked movie. Wicked isn’t a straight Oz adaptation; it’s a movie version of a Broadway version of a revisionist novel retelling the story from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view. But it still takes place in the wonderful land of Oz, and the new movie Wicked: For Good (adapting the second act of the musical) more explicitly ties into the events of the original film (moreso than the original book). Naturally, with the sorta-sequel’s success assured, there has been talk about how to extend this version of Oz into a third installment of some sort. (Maybe they can finally start incorporating characters like Tik-Tok and the Patchwork Girl!) Related: The Wizard of Oz at 80: how the world fell under its dark spell Even if Wicked: For Gooder doesn’t come to pass, there are plenty of other Oz projects in the works. Another musical version, The Wiz, is embarking on a national tour following a Broadway revival. The actual characters are in the public domain, which means a cheap and presumably cheeky horror movie is inevitably on the way. A modern-day YA TV series called Dorothy is in the works at Amazon (with Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton producing). Or, if you prefer to stay within the 1939 film, you can always try to gather some cash to bid on yet another auction that includes the Wicked Witch’s actual hat. This type of Oz memorabilia has a history of outdoing expectations. Some of the 1939 movie’s enduring popularity can be chalked up to its pure image-making craft. The moment where Dorothy’s sepia-toned Kansas surroundings give way to the full, super-saturated Technicolor landscapes of Oz is one of the most indelible moments in all of cinema. (Oh, is that all?) At the same time, plenty of iconic works of cinema don’t go this distance nearly a century later. Even the beloved Gone with the Wind, another 1939 release worked on by Fleming and based on a popular novel, doesn’t have this level of staying power. (I’d like to say that’s the inherent racism at work, but for some folks that might be a feature, not a bug.) What Wicked seems to build upon – again, more from the movie than the original Baum book – is the allegorical power of Dorothy’s trip from stifling, vaguely repressive Kansas to an imaginative, strange, eye-popping world. Yet there’s plenty to please the more conservative members of the audience too, with Dorothy deciding, despite the close friends she makes in Oz, that she’s simply desperate to return home – with the audience perhaps newly aware that the normies she knew in Kansas are played by the same actors as the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion. So you have some escapism chased with reassurance that farm life in Kansas is more or less the same thing as a vast kingdom of magic and talking animals. It’s easy to imagine, say, a gay kid and their less-than-understanding parents watching the movie and both feeling like it validates their feelings. Related: ‘I was born in a melting pot. Melting isn’t fun’: Jon M Chu on Wicked: For Good, Ariana Grande – and living the American dream The books are not so simple: Dorothy eventually relocates to Oz permanently. (Her trips there also become hilariously less elaborate than a tornado carrying her house or falling overboard on a ship.) And the feature Return to Oz, inspired by some of the sequel novels, opens with Dorothy threatened with shock treatments over her incessant nostalgia for her Oz trip, in a frightening scene that evokes conversion therapy. Wicked, too, has barely concealed allegory for racism, homophobia or any other social prejudice, as Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is ostracized and scapegoated by the duplicitous Wizard, who projects the image of power despite being something of a con artist. (Sound familiar?) Much of the allegorical material in Wicked is clumsy stuff, especially in the distended For Good, which more than doubles the length of the play’s weaker second act. But its lineage connecting back to the old movie’s legacy of providing solace for viewers who feel ill at lease in their regular lives is obviously powerful. That continued with the Broadway and film versions of The Wiz, where the Oz concept is reimagined with an all-Black cast, underlining the story’s resonance with marginalized groups. It’s particularly notable that works focusing more on the Wizard himself – the Sam Raimi prequel film from 2013, or some of Baum’s sequels – don’t seem to have as much impact as explorations of the story’s female characters. Even the wild fantastical stuff often feels secondary to that emotional grounding. Maybe that’s why there hasn’t (yet) been a major, big-budget Oz theme park (though doubtless that will pop up at some point). It’s the rare fantasy-world franchise that doesn’t necessarily ask for your full buy-in. Instead, it constantly leaves you hovering between bizarre fantasy and heartbreaking reality.