“Wicked ” is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. It lives up to its name as tears and laughter fill the air of theaters everywhere.

Excitement for this movie has been built for years, as the broadway version opened on Oct. 30, 2003 and the book released in 1995. The movie version of “Wicked” was originally announced in 2012, but due to a long development and delays, they finally hired director Jon M. Chu and casted Cynthia Eviro as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in 2021.

While preparing to film, Grande and Eviro decided that all songs should be done live to further the connection to the songs. This includes the live stunts Eviro did herself during “Defying Gravity.” The live singing gives the movie an extra flare of excitement and authenticity it would be greatly missing without.

Most of the sets shown in the movie were entirely real and actually built, including the nine million tulips they planted in one for one of the first scenes of the movie. They also actually built a train for the journey to Emerald City, the city itself along with Shiz, the University for the citizens of OZ. This along with the live singing just makes the movie practically perfect in the eyes of many.

It applies to every audience, you don’t have to be a musical nerd to understand what is going on, though I would recommend watching “The Wizard of OZ” before watching, even if you don’t the movie would still make sense “The Wizard of OZ” just adds some world building to make the world make a little more sense.

Even through the controversy surrounding the movie before, during and after production and the release, the movie has come out and thrived. There have been a significant amount of controversies with the cheating scandal between Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater in 2023, and currently people are worried for the well being of Grande and Elviro as they have lost a significant amount of weight during production and are crying during almost every interview. Most including Grande and Elviro are disproving these claims with the facts that both Grande and Elviro that they worked exceedingly hard to learn the dances perfectly and have said that they “worked themselves to the bone.” The filming of “Wicked” was also an extremely emotional experience for both Grande and Elviro as doing this has been both of their dreams for most of their lives.

Even through this, audiences cannot stop talking about “Wicked,” and how excited they are for the next part of the movie to come out on Nov. 21, 2025.