Speaking of Wicked, it is indeed a ‘wicked’ trend to split a source text into two for its Hollywood adaptation. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, The Hobbit, Dune… all of these things could have, with more judicious editing, made for a perfectly enjoyable single film. In their expanded form they invariably wind up prolonged and flabby, throwing away their best opportunities for pace and energy in favour of improved profit margins.

With John Chu’s two-part movie adaptation of Broadway musical Wicked, the problems seem even more egregious. Wicked: For Good (2025) adapts the second act of the Winnie Holzman/Stephen Schwartz play, which even in its original live form is substandard to the first. The catchier songs are all in the first half, with little to enliven the second. The narrative is much cleaner too, without the awkward shoe-horning of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz into Wicked novelist Gregory Maguire’s re-imagining of the same. Things that happened in the first half, while not perfectly developed, had at least a competent structure to them and more than a few engaging ideas. In For Good, a great many things happen not because they logically flow from Wicked, but because they are needed to intersect with The Wizard of Oz. The result is clumsy, oddly anticlimactic, and a solid half-hour longer than it needs to be.

It is, then, up to the non-scripted elements of the film to compensate. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo remain a winning combination, demonstrating both strong dramatic talent and sensational singing voices. They as good as own the film’s emotional climax, which as with other key sequences is well visualised by director Jon M. Chu. Jeff Goldblum benefits from some rather more interesting material the second time around; in the first film he did seem rather wasted.

Michelle Yeoh continues to struggle with the material and the musical, never quite pulling off her songs nor convincing in the heightened, musical context of the film. Her character also struggles to have a purpose: by film’s end her villainous character Madame Morrible is not so much defeated as quietly told to go away. It is dreadfully anti-climactic, but by the time she is written out the core climax of the film has been and gone. Her fate is really just another overloaded element in a pointlessly extended epilogue.

When Wicked: For Good hits an effective emotional beat, it is invariably because it involves Elphaba, Glinda, or both. Those moments do not come often enough to completely recover the film from its weaknesses. There is much to enjoy in fits and starts – much as there was in 2024’s first Wicked – and For Good does gain the benefit of having an actual conclusion at the end, but ultimately this strikes me as rather middling entertainment. Hopefully the hardcore appreciate all of the extended detail; for the rest of us it just seems like bloat.