Ariana Grande Makes the Most of What's Salvageable in Wicked: For Good
Ariana Grande carries this uneven, unevenly shot conclusion to Oz's biggest musical about as far as it can go.
By MIGUEL MATEO | NOVEMBER 17, 2025
Ariana Grande is the reason "Wicked: For Good" works as often as it does. Where "Wicked" belonged to Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba, this half of the story shifts its center to Glinda, and Grande meets that shift with a performance that borders on spectacular. She plays the character's guilt and self-deception with a control that never tips into caricature, and the film's energy dips noticeably whenever she is off screen. It is a tell that the production knows exactly where its power source is, even when the script around her doesn't always know what to do with it.
The music remains the strongest asset overall. The two leads' performance of "For Good" lands as the emotional bookend to a friendship audiences have followed for years now, and it is one of the rare numbers here that the film actually lets breathe, trusting the two performers to carry the moment without overdressing it.
Part Two was always going to have a harder road, given how much thinner the second act of the stage musical is compared to the first. That gap shows early. The film spends real time on Nessarose (Marissa Bode) and Boq (Ethan Slater), from her decree barring Munchkins from leaving the region to his attempt to leave once he learns of Fiyero and Glinda's wedding. Both actors do what they can with it, but the material never earns the real estate it's given, and it pulls focus from the story the film actually wants to tell just as the back half needs to be gathering momentum.
The visual choices are a bigger problem here than they were in "Wicked," and two scenes in particular make the gap obvious. Elphaba's discovery of the imprisoned Animals in the Wizard's lair gets lost in a murky, cluttered frame that undercuts what should be one of the film's darkest and most pointed turns. "No Good Deed" suffers the same fate. It should be the showcase Erivo's voice has earned by this point in the story, but the sequence is shot so busy and frenetic, all whirling camera and overlapping movement, that the performance gets buried under its own staging rather than elevated by it. Musicals like "West Side Story" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman" understand how to use color and light as storytelling tools in their own right, shaping mood and meaning through the frame itself. Chu never finds that same command here, and it is hard not to wonder what another filmmaker, one more fluent in how a musical number should actually look, might have done with this material.
Michelle Yeoh is usually a reliable presence in anything she is in, which makes it more disappointing that she is simply the wrong fit for Madame Morrible. The miscasting was noticeable in the first film, where the character stayed mostly in the background, and it becomes even more apparent here as Morrible takes on a larger role in the plot and is asked to carry scenes that need a more theatrical, campier register than Yeoh seems interested in giving.
When "Wicked: For Good" does find its footing, it soars, particularly in its musical set pieces. But that footing never holds for the full runtime. The film moves in fits and starts rather than building continuously the way its predecessor did, and the seams show in a way "Wicked" mostly avoided.
Even so, the film sticks its landing. It closes out one of the more successfully adapted movie musicals of the era on a note that feels earned, even if the road to get there wobbles more than it should.
Rating: ★★1/2 out of ★★★★★