‘Wicked’ Success and a Look Back Hollywood’s Bumpy Road to Oz
Jon M. Chu’s musical Wicked (Part One), starring Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, is set to defy gravity over the coming weeks as the blockbuster event of the holiday season. Adapted from Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s long-running Tony and Grammy Award-winning Broadway musical, itself based on Gregory Maguire’s fantasy novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked has the kind of built-in fanbase most Hollywood musicals can only dream of.
While recent theatrical musical adaptations and originals like West Side Story (2021), The Color Purple (2023), Wonka (2023) and Chu’s In the Heights (2021) had their share of fans, none could compare with the Wicked phenomenon — except for maybe, Cats (2019). Jokes aside, Wicked’s fanbase has been maintained and further populated by a plethora of merch, Broadway reunions, album re-releases, a 15th anniversary Halloween TV special and, of course, the built-in IP familiarity of The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Yet, despite the undeniably iconic legacy of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, and the adoration, intrigue and tragedy surrounding Judy Garland, Hollywood has long struggled to find success within the pages of author L. Frank Baum’s 14-book Oz series. While Wicked only grows in popularity, and The Wizard of Oz remains a childhood rite of passage, studios have faced the puzzle of bringing further adventures in Oz to the big screen for nearly a century, with most attempts fairing little better than The Wicked Witch of the East.
In the early 1900s, half a century before C.S. Lewis unveiled Narnia in his Chronicles, and well before the First World War and the events that would shape J.R.R. Tolkien’s tales of hobbits and Middle-Earth, an American was the biggest name in children’s fantasy literature: Baum, who saw himself as the modern equivalent of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, created the Land of Oz.
The first installment, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was an immediate success, with its first printing selling out entirely. In quick order, a Broadway musical geared towards adult audiences was written in 1901, with Baum as co-writer that premiered in 1902. The success of the book and musical resulted in Baum writing another 13 novels in the series. As one of the early American authors to see the profit and viability of mixed media — plans for an Oz theme park never came to fruition — he started a film production company, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, and created The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, and attempted to adapt his Oz books through a combination of live actors, film and magic lantern slides. Baum could’ve been the equivalent of Walt Disney before Disney had even made his mark with Mickey Mouse, except for the fact that outside of his books, these creative endeavors left him in such dire financial straits that not even the success of his books could fully dig him out of the hole. Despite the 14 Oz books written during Baum’s lifetime and the 26 canonical novels that followed, the success of the books has rarely resulted in the same success from adapted media.
Before Fleming’s film, Larry Semon directed The Wizard of Oz (1925), a silent film in which Semon also played the Scarecrow, which drastically changed the source material while receiving poor reception from critics. It was followed by a nine-minute animated short film in 1933 that had little in common with Baum’s work. MGM was the first major studio to see the mass cinematic potential in Baum’s Oz. While it received rave reviews upon release and gathered a handful of Oscar nominations, The Wizard of Oz, was a box-office failure upon release in 1939. At the time, the $2.8 million budgeted film was the most expensive film production of all time and, coupled with a significant marketing budget, it would be another decade until MGM made a profit off the film through re-releases. While the making of and legacy of MGM’s film is long and storied, to the point where numerous books have been written on the subject, it’s what happened afterward in terms of Oz adaptations and derivations that shows finding success in Hollywood hasn’t been nearly as simple as following a yellow-brick road.
Even in the aftermath of The Wizard of Oz turning a profit and becoming a theatrical institution, MGM did not pursue a sequel. Part of this could be chalked up to the fact that sequels were a rarity in this era, even with the pre-existing material available. Another factor could have been the fact that MGM’s film had such a troubled, expensive production and resulted in adverse health effects for many of the film’s cast and crew, where doing it again wasn’t worth the risk or bad press.
By 1956, Baum’s original novel had entered the public domain, with the other books quickly following suit. While MGM retained rights to certain elements introduced in its film, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the elements from the books were up for grabs — and they were grabbed. From the Soviet Union films to Japanese animated series, Oz was kept alive, even if a number of the adaptations have since been lost and forgotten by all except film and Oz historians.
The first major attempt by Hollywood to continue the adventures of Dorothy and her friends was Filmation’s animated Journey Back to Oz (1972), based on Baum’s second novel in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz. Though it gained popularity on TV broadcasts several years later, the film’s theatrical release was a disappointment, despite boasting Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, as the voice of Dorothy, along with Mickey Rooney as the Scarecrow and the original Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton, as Aunt Em. Sandwiched between Disney’s The Aristocrats (1970) and Robin Hood (1973), it’s easy to see why Journey didn’t exactly move audiences to see it in theaters.
Hollywood’s next major attempt was Universal Studios’ The Wiz (1978), directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Joel Schumacher, based on the 1974 Broadway musical by Charlie Smalls and William F. Brown with Luther Vandross. A reimagining of The Wizard of Oz through Black culture, The Wiz seemingly had everything going for it: Diana Ross as Dorthy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Richard Pryor as the Wiz and the musical supervision of Quincy Jones. Despite all of this, the film was a critical and financial failure with the most vocal criticisms hurled at Ross for her performance as well as her age compared to the age of the traditional Dorothy and the grungy, industrial look of Oz, which was a far cry from the technicolor matte paintings of the original. These criticisms seemed to have come down to a disconnect between Black audiences and white critics, as The Wiz has gained a significant cult following over the years, and, as a personal aside, I always grew up with it being a staple of Black theater culture.
Disney bought the live-action film rights to all of Baum’s sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1954, which goes a long way in explaining why most of Baum’s Oz novels have remained untapped. Faced with losing the rights, Return to Oz (1985) was born out of a brainstorming session on what to make to hold onto the rights. Though it was born of greed, the resulting feature was a bold, nightmarish depiction of Baum’s land that has left a lasting impression on millennial audiences. Return to Oz, the sole feature film of director Walter Murch, best known as the editor of Apocalypse Now (1979), is primarily based on Ozma of Oz, the third book in Baum’s series. Gone were the pastoral scenes of the American Midwest, the folksy dreamscape of Oz and Dorothy Gale’s enduring optimism. Instead, Dorothy — portrayed by Fairuza Balk, who would later gain fame as the quintessential ’90s goth girl in The Craft (1996) — is taken to a sanatorium by her aunt and uncle who believe her constant talk of Oz to be a delusion. Facing electroshock therapy, Dorothy escapes and nearly drowns in a river that takes her to Oz.
All of her old friends — the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion — have been turned to stone, while Wheelers, sinister kidnappers with wheels instead of hands and feet, hunt Dorothy for Princess Mombi who wears the heads of her victims and wants to add Dorothy’s to her collection. It is a delightfully insane film, responsible for further fostering many a horror film fan, including myself. The film, as you may have guessed, was not a hit with audiences or critics who were expecting a children’s film. Return to Oz tanked at the box office, though it did earn an Oscar nomination for visual effects and, like The Wiz, has become a cult classic.
It would be 28 years until Oz returned to the big screen, and once again, Disney was behind the curtain. In the interim, Disney had lost the rights to Baum’s books, and by 1996, all 14 of the original novels were in the public domain. Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), a $215 million effort by Disney to create a new live-action franchise in the vein of Pirates of the Caribbean, isn’t based on any one particular book. Rather, Oz the Great and Powerful is a prequel set 20 years before the events of The Wizard of Oz that follows con-man Oscar Diggs (James Franco), who is swept away in his hot air balloon to the Land of Oz where he emerges as a hero.
Ironically, Oz the Great and Powerful was inspired by Wicked, both Maguire’s novel and the stage musical, and features a similar transformation of a well-intentioned good witch, Theodora (Mila Kunis), who is manipulated by her sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) into believing that Glinda (Michelle Williams) is evil, resulting in Theodora’s transformation into the Wicked Witch of the West. The film certainly isn’t lacking Raimi’s recognizable style or strong performances and overall, the reviews were mixed to positive. The film even made close to half a billion dollars worldwide and was a minor success for Disney. The problem came down to the fact that Disney was banking on a billion-dollar hit akin to Alice in Wonderland (2010), and early box office reports suggested it would do just that. Whatever had led Disney to believe that a property that had never been a huge box-office success would result in a billion-dollar hit was deflated, and plans for sequels that took place before Dorothy’s arrival were shelved.
Eleven years after Oz the Great and Powerful, Universal now stands to bring in a bigger audience and box office than any Oz film before it with its Wicked big-screen adaptation, and it could potentially do it again next November when Wicked Part Two flies into theaters. So, beyond a stellar soundtrack and a popular Broadway show — which I’d argue has a much more limited audience than the number of moviegoers set to seek the film out in the coming weeks, given the price of local theater tickets — what’s the draw? Why is this revisionist history presented by Maguire and the subsequent musical so much more appealing than further adaptations of Baum’s novel?
Perhaps the problem with adapting the works of Baum is that, unlike The Chronicles of Narnia or The Hobbit, they are fundamentally children’s stories with simplistic morals of a world that no longer exists and lacked romance, violence or hard-fought lessons. Instrumental as he was, Baum was an author whose world-view was simultaneously progressive (women’s suffrage) and appalling (his call for the genocide of American Indians), and his books have become an outdated reflection of that. While it seems unlikely very many studio execs in the 20th century would’ve been concerned with Baum’s personal opinions and would’ve likely categorized them as being of their time (though, they weren’t), there is no little doubt that the rapid global shifts that occurred after his death suggested that a different kind of fantasy was needed to better reflect the world.
Oz had to change to stay current. But those changes, seen in The Wiz and Return to Oz, tried to incorporate and rub against the classical notions of Oz and who Dorothy should be, creating friction between the past and present. What Maguire did was eliminate the problem of the classical version of Baum’s Oz and replace it with the harsh moral lessons, the political issues, the sex and the violence that Baum had avoided. He didn’t adapt Oz to fit his needs, he reimagined it in a way that arguably had the same effect of recontextualizing children’s fantasy, as Alan Moore did on superhero comics when he wrote Watchmen. Simply put, he aged Oz up to better reflect the life and times of the present.
Although the musical scaled back some of the darker moments, political concerns and explicit themes of Maguire’s novel, it still shakes the foundations of Baum’s world. This doesn’t mean that Oz or the musical Wicked is forbidden for children, only that it tackles these characters with a sense of maturity that meets the audiences of today who have grown up in a world of bigotry, false narratives, leaders who inspire violence, and persecution — a wicked, though still, somehow surprisingly beautiful, world.
Many audiences who grew up forming a cult around The Wiz and Return to Oz, and who saw the seeds of Elphaba’s story right beneath the surface of Oz the Great and Powerful, see Wicked as a chance to revisit Oz in a way that speaks to them. Whether it does or doesn’t fulfill those expectations comes down to each viewer. But having the opportunity to take that chance is, at the very least, proving to be incredibly pop-u-lar.
