SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for “Wicked: For Good,” now playing in theaters.
“Wicked: For Good” director Jon M. Chu revealed to Business Insider that he refused to show Universal Pictures executives the final shot of his two-part musical adaptation, fearing they would want to use the powerful last image in the movie’s marketing campaign. The film ends on a close-up shot of Glinda whispering into Elphaba’s ear. It’s a direct recreation of the poster for the original “Wicked” Broadway musical.
“Yes. It was always the plan. I was always going to end on the whisper,” Chu said. “Do you know how hard it was to force Universal to never use it in any marketing material? They even had a poster of it for the first movie, and I was like, ‘Why are we releasing this poster? We should never acknowledge the whisper. Never. Never.’ I wanted it to feel like we didn’t care about it, then suddenly it’s the last shot in ‘For Good.’ So the studio never saw that final shot. I imposed a huge thing: ‘Do not show this shot!’ They wanted it so badly.”
Chu continued, “That poster is one of the most brilliant posters ever made. You don’t know what Glinda’s saying, because they never actually do that in the musical. But it’s sort of the key to friendship. That we have these secrets. And the girls got to choose what they are actually saying in the scene. I don’t even know what they said.”
As Chu noted, Universal did use a recreation of the original “Wicked” Broadway post for a poster during the marketing of the first “Wicked” movie. The poster was released in October 2024, about one month before the film opened in theaters. Given how iconic the image of Glinda whispering in Elphaba’s ear is for “Wicked” fans, many of them flooded social media to call out what Universal’s movie poster got wrong in recreating the image. Fans used photoshop to make corrections to the poster, with Elphaba’s hat being lowered and her lips getting a bold red lipstick. Erivo found such alterations hurtful.\
“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posing the the question ‘is your p—- green?” Erivo wrote on her Instagram story at the time while sharing one of the photoshopped “Wicked” posters with her face covered. “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
“The original poster is an Illustration,” Erivo added. “I am a real life human being, who chose to to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer. … Because, without words we communicate with our eyes. Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.”
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“Wicked: For Good” is now playing in theaters nationwide from Universal. Head over to Business Insider’s website to read Chu’s latest interview in its entirety.
From Variety US