Spoilers ahead for Wicked: For Good.
I’m a millennial theater kid, so the Wicked movies have basically been like the Super Bowl for me the last two years. While it remains to be seen if For Good joins the ranks of musicals that have won Best Picture, the sequel has been breaking records at the box office. There’s been some debate about whether or not Glinda knows what happened to Elphaba during the movie’s finale, and now director Jon M. Chu has weighed in.
While the first Wicked movie (which is streaming with an Amazon Prime subscription) showed Glinda and Elphaba’s friendship growing, For Good features a time jump and offers a much more complicated look into that dynamic. At the end of the movie Cynthia Erivo‘s character is seemingly killed by Dorothy, although it’s later revealed that it was a trick so that she and Fiyero could leave Oz and have peace. But poor Glinda seemingly has no clue, and thinks her best friend and ex are both dead. During an interview with Variety, Chu addressed the question about whether or not Grande’s character knows they’re alive, saying:
I definitely have a definitive idea in my head. But I prefer everyone to be able to interpret it how they want to.
In the stage musical it’s pretty clear that Glinda has no idea, with Fiyero and Elphaba lamenting that they couldn’t tell her before departing Oz. That’s still basically how it goes in Wicked: For Good, but a lingering shot of Grande makes it a little more ambiguous. And according to Chu, that debate is kinda what he was going for.
I’m a Wicked Act II apologist, and I therefore know the original material very well. While I thought the show’s ending was pretty cut and dry, I definitely noticed that the movie’s finale was a bit less clear. In the same interview Jon M. Chu shared why this open-ended conclusion makes sense, offering:
It was never a buttoned-up fairy tale. It was born of raw human nature, and something beautiful emerges from that.
He’s not wrong. While the story of Wicked is magical and connected to The Wizard of Oz, it’s ultimately a story about the human conditions. Characters are flawed, make mistakes, and then try to find their way back to each other. Sometimes that happens like when Glinda and Elphaba take responsibility for their mistakes in “For Good”. Others like Nessa and Boq aren’t so lucky.
Wicked isn’t an offbeat musical, so there were plenty of fans who knew the source material when watching Chu’s pair of movies. Even so there were some big surprises in the movie, including that somewhat ambiguous finale. Personally I prefer the original, with Glinda unfortunately thinking her loved ones are dead. Does that make me heartless?
Wicked: For Good is in theaters now as part of the 2025 movie release list. You can make your own decision about its ending, specifically what Glinda does or does not know.
