Wicked Part 2 or Wicked: For Good came out in November of 2025. It has a current audience score of 93% and a critical score of 66% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

I saw it myself in theaters, and it was an interesting movie to say the least. 

As someone who has only heard the stage production- not seen it, and has listened to just about the first four chapters of the audiobook, I didn’t know much about the story before watching the Wicked movie. 

The movie was, to put it plainly, decent. It was 2 ½ hours long, which was probably more run time than it needed- and I found some qualities of the movie, such as the visuals and music, to be enjoyable, but other parts, like the story, were fairly lacking.  

Something the second movie carried over from the first was the unique and gorgeous visuals. There’s a distinct style to Wicked that feels whimsical, but more importantly, gives the movie’s setting an identity. Not all movies (especially fantastical ones) can accomplish this. 

Some highlights: Glinda’s house felt exactly like you’d expect her house to look, the flower fields were beautiful, and everything about the look of No Good Deed was amazingly well done. 

Sitting down to watch it, I was unfortunately the least excited about the music. A distinct feature of the original soundtrack is the number of songs in the first half (11) compared to the second (7). The only notable ones I really recalled before watching were No Good Deed and For Good. However, they did add in some new songs and a few reprises from the first movie. 

None of these were offensive, and I enjoyed listening to them, though they weren’t quite as show-stopping as numbers like Defying Gravity and Dancing Through Life. 

With fewer larger peppy numbers, there wasn’t as much of the intricate fun choreography I loved in the first movie, which was disappointing, but it did make sense for the movie’s darker tone. 

Cynthia Ereivio’s voice was still absolutely awesome. No Good Deed was my favorite because of her vocal performance. 

All that to say- the story of Wicked: For Good, to me, unfortunately fell flat. 

 (Spoilers ahead.)

As the movie started, I was feeling pretty good about it. It handily established the status quo without dumping a bunch of exposition into dialogue, which was appreciated. 

Yet, the further into the story the movie got, the more the issues with pacing and setup began to show. 

Almost every scene felt too rushed or too slow. 

The rushed feeling was most prevalent in just about the entire plot with Nessa and Bok. 

Nessa, in particular, felt like a completely different character from the first movie, with little justification for the more aggressive change, and only quick exposition through dialogue. 

Elphaba turning up and giving her the ability to fly with her shoes felt irrelevant, and yes, it’s better than the ableist fix of making her walk on her own, but to what narrative purpose does it really serve? In general, with Nessa, what was her arc? All of her plot happened in the span of twenty minutes, at the end of which she calls herself The Witch of the East -after doing one singular spell and messing it up- before disappearing until her character is killed off by the original plot of the 1939 Wizard of OZ Movie. 

(Also, really, Glinda? You’re giving your former best friend’s dead sister’s -non-magic- shoes to a random farm girl… why???)  

From the storyline with Nessa, Bok’s transformation into the tin man was executed a little better. The major change in his character is his obsession with Glinda to an obsession with revenge, which also made sense and stuck true to his character. But with so little in between screen time, I lowkey forgot he existed until the end. 

Some time with these two was needed to make it make sense. 

The same cannot be said about a good two-thirds of the movie.

 In general, the way the majority of the movie dragged felt like there was no direction, and the choices characters made felt contrived or irrelevant. 

Glinda, Elphaba, Fiyero, even the Wizard had moments that felt forced, and avoidable, i.e., the entire ‘fight’ scene that ended in Fiyero’s capture, which Glinda seemed to conveniently forget a scene later.   

The drag caused uneven plot development as well. Songs, emotional moments, high-stakes scenes, the parts of the story that were meant to be big and tragic, had very little meaningful buildup. 

For example, the reveal that Doctor Dillamond (the mentor goat from the first movie) was still alive and imprisoned came out of nowhere, as he wasn’t mentioned once by any of the characters as the movie started, didn’t have any lines, and didn’t seem to have any real effect on Elphaba aside from one reference in No Good Deed. He (ironically) was silenced by the movie the same way all the animals who were vastly mistreated by the Ozions and the Wizard were.

Elphaba’s entire goal throughout the movie is to stop the Wizard from hurting the animals, but she spends a total of two scenes in the 2 hours actually helping them- and one of those only happened through plot gymnastics.

We don’t get the sense that the movie even cares all that much about the conflict aside from the fact that it makes Elphaba a tragic hero. So when the animals are reintroduced to society by Glinda, it’s laughable how little it really matters. 

Everything is forgiven, Glinda is good now, the animals and the Ozions are totally chill living together in harmony again, even though half of society until 30 seconds prior lumped them into the same camp as the Wicked Witch of the West.  

But the most obvious 1 to 100 without build-up had to do with Elphaba and Fiyero. 

‘As Long as You’re Mine’, the love ballad between the two, happened without a single conversation between the two. Fiyero leaves Glinda on their wedding night, and he immediately declares his love for Elphaba a few hours later. They haven’t talked to each other since the last movie. And while Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey have great chemistry and act it well, there is almost no context to their sudden ride-or-die relationship, which really makes subsequent plot points -Elphaba’s spiral, Fiyero as the scarecrow, the fake-out death, etc.- feel somewhat hollow. 

The biggest problem for me was how much the movie strayed from what the first focused on the most intensely: the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda. The relationship that represented the core struggles of the story. What is Good and what is Wicked; are appearances everything; can one person have wickedness thrust upon them, and can they change? The musical is actually bookended by the words “good” and “wicked”. But these themes, and their relationship in how they relate to these themes, aren’t explored nearly to the extent they SHOULD be. 

For example, neither Elphaba nor Glinda does anything overtly Wicked. Elphaba sings a song about never being nice again, and yells at a teenager; Glinda becomes a propaganda puppet because she always wanted to be magic, and cries a lot. Both felt like they were lacking real agency as characters, and thus the decisions they made felt random or like another piece that moved the plot- not something that represented the parts of them that were inherently good and wicked. 

The scenes they have together are telling too. There’s little to no tension in any of them that creates genuine obstacles (and there SHOULD be if they’re on opposite sides of a metaphorical and physical conflict), and the only part they seem to actually be frustrated with each other turns into a cat fight over a guy. 

For Good was sung wonderfully and acted just fine, but it felt more like an edgier version of the bridge in Defying Gravity than a resolution of a story spanning conflict, because there wasn’t any tension. 

Overall, Wicked: For Good was an okay movie. It was enjoyable for the music and the visuals, but if you’re looking for a vibe like Part 1, and a top-tier epic conclusion to the story they tried to tell, you may be a bit disappointed.