'Wicked' shows all that we've lost in Hollywood

by Mitchel Green - January 8, 2025

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

Oh, to be wowed by trash. While those behind Universal’s new smash Broadway adaptation of “Wicked” and its many adoring fans will no doubt see it as the latest achievement in a long and storied history of stage-to-film Hollywood musicals, the film is instead another in an increasingly long line of safe, unchallenging, expensive IP event films that have lowered the standards of a generation of moviegoers beyond salvation.

There’s no point in me analyzing “Wicked” as a work of adaptation. I’m unfamiliar with the original book, and my relationship with the stage show goes as far as listening to the soundtrack only once in its totality. From the reactions of people familiar with the musical, the film gives the impression of success insofar as it offers its target audience exactly what they expect (far from a glowing endorsement). My only frame of reference here is “The Wizard of Oz,” a longtime favorite film of mine, and “Wicked” can’t compete on any front — not in creativity, craft, performance, or even the nebulously-defined “movie magic” that often gets associated with these light, family-oriented fantasy films. I have problems with the material, but that’s not the film’s fault. If you were to change every aspect of the narrative I took issue with, you wouldn’t have “Wicked,” so I’ll just say this: the entire concept is an ill-advised, cynical attempt at subverting a beloved property for the sake of selling books and tickets that would be far more interesting if it were created from scratch.

I think it’s more valuable to discuss “Wicked”`s place in a genre so near and dear to me, and how that historical context shows what an awful piece of filmmaking it is. This was the bread and butter of Hollywood during its golden age. There’s a level of craft on display in the most unremarkable C-tier Fred Astaire movie or Broadway adaptation that many major Hollywood releases today, not just musicals, are missing. That’s not to say a lot of these movies were great (or even good), but there was a baseline competency in the technical aspects of the film that allowed the material to do the heavy lifting. In the case of “Wicked,” that wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing given the poor quality of the script, but it would explain the love from people who are huge fans of the musical and don’t care much about film as a medium other than as an image delivery system.

The movie musical died long ago. A string of bloated, middling Broadway adaptations bombing at the box office combined with a cultural rejection of the earnestness that defines these types of films led to the traditional musical’s demise in the broader Hollywood landscape back in the 1960s. Production of these movies plummeted and the genre has mostly been relegated to the medium of animation since. Occasional critical and commercial hits have harkened a supposed return of the movie musical on several occasions this decade — be it the Best Picture-winning adaptation of “Chicago” or Damien Chazelle’s beloved Jacques Demy-riff “La La Land” — but it seems like Hollywood still doesn’t believe musicals can be successful.

This idea has bled through to the marketing of recent entries like “Mean Girls” trying to mask the fact that they are musicals to begin with. A movie like “Wicked” doesn’t have that luxury. If you’re familiar with the property at all, you know what you’re getting into, and if you aren’t familiar, you probably aren’t going to be interested anyway. As a result, the compulsion to manipulate the audience into believing they aren’t watching a musical bleeds into the film’s aesthetics, and a genre once defined by bright colors, dazzling costumes and sets, and overall grand spectacle is transformed into one that tries to ground itself in reality but instead rests in the uncanny valley. Much has been said about the film’s muted use of color, an attempt at a more “realistic” visual style — which, as we all know, is the aim of any fantasy film. That in and of itself isn’t the issue with how the film looks — though it is odd to have such colorful costumes and sets and not want to show it off, the money isn’t on the screen as they say. “Wicked”`s problem is one of composition.

Jon M. Chu’s directorial approach seems to be to shoot for the edit. There’s a lot of coverage here, plenty of angles to bounce aimlessly between in an attempt to manufacture energy, but Chu doesn’t seem to realize this approach drains any momentum from the final cut. It also distracts from the choreography by requiring the viewer to refocus on a new shot every 5 seconds and not allowing time to marvel at the complexity of the footwork or the intricacy of the staging. The film looks even worse outside of the musical numbers, as your attention is really drawn to how uncreative Chu’s shot selection is. He returns again and again to the same shallow focus, subject in the center of the frame shot-reverse-shot technique, which might be fine if the film wasn’t shot in a widescreen frame where the excess space is either empty or you can’t make out anything behind the character talking. This could be to hide the lackluster computer-generated effects, but then why use animation when you don’t need to? We already know the film can be made without them because we saw Oz in all its tactile glory in 1939. The simple answer is that it was cheaper to do it this way, but if you’re already spending $150 million to make a movie, why not spend a little more to make it look like it cost that much? If the studios are going to abandon small and mid-budget films to push all of their chips into tentpoles, the tentpoles should look like they were worth killing more interesting but less profitable movies.

None of this has blunted the enthusiasm of audiences and even some critics. “Wicked”`s broad populist qualities and box office performance will catapult it near the top of the Best Picture Oscar race. However, this success sends a dangerous message to studios and the sturdy journeymen they hire to shepherd these massive projects to completion. Turning a blind eye to the corner-cutting craft on display simply because you already like the material is exactly the reaction they want from viewers. They want to lower your standards so they can get away with putting out a cheaper, poorer-quality product without risking their profits. “Wicked” getting a free pass opens the gates for more films like it. We’ve always had empty, simplistic studio pictures aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator, but gone are the days of expensive, dazzling, sturdy Hollywood craftsmanship. Even the American film industry’s capacity for spectacle is disappearing. When that goes, the whole system comes down.