Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, the writers of the box office hit ‘Wicked,’ also weigh in on the reactions to the film, the pressures of adapting a beloved musical and those Glinda romance theories.
It’s hard to scroll through TikTok without seeing a video about Universal’s latest hit, Wicked. While each video is different, the comments sections all share at least a few rumblings of the same thought: “Don’t spoil the rest of Wicked!”
Holzman says the film’s director Jon M. Chu, along with everyone else that worked on the film “wanted to stay true to the spirit” of Wicked’s stage production. Fox says she has a rule with her children, and anyone else who might ask, about spoiling what’s to come. “There’s a play that exists. There are some answers in that you can know, whatever that is. If you go figure out and find that out yourself, you can know those things,” she says. “And nothing else.”
Holzman and Fox, who recently snagged a Critics Choice nomination for writing the film, don’t blame anyone worried about spoilers, and say they’re touched by the passionate responses from fans. “I really feel for them. I really do,” Holzman says. She later adds, “I have to pay homage to people who are having their responses because that is what we wanted. Passion is beautiful. It shows how they gave their hearts.”
Wicked, which stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Galinda/Glinda, tells the untold story of the witches of Oz. The film and the forthcoming Wicked: Part Two, set to hit theaters in November 2025, are based on the 2003 musical of the same name, which was originally adapted from the best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire. Academy Award-winning composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz returned to the show to adapt the musical for the screen.
Holzman and Fox say they’ve been feeling the love since the movie arrived in theaters. “The love is so palpable from my point of view,” Holzman says. “We’re getting these responses from people that are so heartfelt and genuine, and this is why we do this.”
While Holzman has been along for almost the entirety of Wicked‘s long ride, Fox says this experience is new for her. “I think Winnie and Stephen have experienced this for so long with the play, but I’m new to this,” she explains. “Feeling that love from people and how much it seems to be moving them. … Every day that we worked together for years, we were like, ‘This has to be the best thing anyone’s ever seen because people care so deeply about this musical, so we have to take care of it.’”
“Responsibility is a very key word,” Holzman say, adding that, not to complain, but she certainly felt pressure when adapting the musical for the screen. “All of us working together, we just felt like we had to give it everything we had and then however people were going to take it. That’s the part we’re not in charge of.”
Holzman suggests “handmade” is the perfect way to describe the Wicked script. “We just carefully put it together with a lot of thoughtfulness and care,” she says. “Every word of it [the script] was so laboriously pulled over. I mean, single lines talked about for weeks,” Fox adds.
Fox notes that she went into the project believing it would be a bit easier due to having both “one of the most amazing plays of all time” and The Wizard of Oz as source material. However, the writer found it to be even harder due to the “pressure of doing right by the original material” and “doing right by the fans of the original material.”
“In our audience, when we first saw it together, every single time the girls did a note that was one tiny bit different than the way it was in the play, people screamed at the top of their lungs,” she says, eliciting a laugh from Holzman.
Changes during the adaptation process were, and still obviously are, a hot topic of discussion. “We were never going, ‘How can we make Wicked into something else?’” Holzman says. “Yet it is something else. It is a whole other version of the same thing.”
As Holzman pointed out, the spirit of Wicked remains in every moment in the film’s first installment. The film stays true to the play, however, both Holzman and Fox point out that the decision to split the movie into two parts allowed for many moments to be expanded. “There almost isn’t an aspect of the plot, there really truly isn’t, that from beginning to end didn’t get explored, reimagined deepened, given more time,” Holzman says of what would’ve been left behind if it was only one film. She notes that the team was able to explore Elphaba’s childhood, something she and Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the musical’s music and lyrics, had always wanted to do.
“Just to also be super concrete about it too, think about the length of the songs and try to add the second act songs into this movie. There’s no time to have one line of dialogue,” Fox says. “It would’ve meant cutting songs, and every song is some fan’s favorite song.”
Holzman adds that she and Schwartz both wanted new songs as well. “The reason we even wanted to have new songs in the second part, and that’s the only thing I’m going to say about the second part, is because we had these ideas of songs that we kind of fell in love with, and as Dana’s saying, we couldn’t even have fit the whole score into one movie,” she says. Holzman also notes that any changes made to part one were made to “increase the intensity or increase the stakes,” never just because.
The writers also weighed in on the fan theories that Glinda and Elphaba’s relationship might be romantic. Author Gregory Maguire, who wrote the book on which the musical is based, recently told Them that the romantic subtext between the two main witches was intentional on his part. Grande also recently suggested in an interview that the possibility was there, saying “Glinda might be a little in the closet. You never know. Give it a little more time.”
Holzman, however, seemingly did not go into writing the original music book or the film with this thought in mind. “For me, that is not it. But that is not to say that I don’t feel gratitude if the queer community is feeling queerness in the movie,” she says. “There’s very real reasons why that would be, and I think that’s beautiful.”
She adds, “In a funny way, it’s really not my business. I want people to have their own response,” and says that the show is mostly about the kind of friendship that changes someone, excuse the pun, for good. “Both of them have a destiny and they needed each other to reach that destiny, and to me, isn’t that fulfilling enough?” she later adds.
Wicked has continued to rise at the box office. The Universal film broke records as the highest opening for a musical adaptation with an estimated $114 million at the domestic box office and dethroning Grease just one week after release to become the top-grossing Broadway musical adaptation of all time.
