Wicked: For Good arrived on Netflix this week, and it comes with a strange scorecard. Audiences adore it, giving it a 97 percent rating that runs even higher than the first film. Critics were noticeably cooler, landing it at 71 percent after the near-universal praise that greeted part one. That is a wide gap for the same franchise, the same cast, the same director, released a year apart. The easy read is that the sequel simply is not as good. I think the truer read is that nobody split the story down the middle of its quality. They split it down the middle of its structure, and part two got the harder half.
The Musical Was Always Front-Loaded
Anyone who has seen the stage show knows this instinctively. The first act of Wicked is the one people leave humming. "Popular" is there. "Defying Gravity" is there, the number that sends audiences into intermission levitating. The second act has always been the trickier stretch, the part where the plot has to connect all the way to The Wizard of Oz, explain the flying monkeys and the melting and the man behind the curtain, and land an ending that earns the friendship at its center. Act two is also where the story turns dark and crowded. Nessarose falls, Fiyero is transformed, and Elphaba hardens into the villain that frightened people have invented around her. On Broadway you feel the show working harder after the break. That imbalance is baked into the material, and when you cut one story into two films, the first movie inherits the fireworks and the second inherits the wiring.
What the Second Movie Was Handed
There is a telling detail here. For the films, Stephen Schwartz wrote two brand-new songs, and both of them live in part two: "No Place Like Home" for Elphaba and "The Girl in the Bubble" for Glinda. The first film did not need new material; the showstoppers were already doing the work. The second one did, because Act Two runs on story and reckoning more than on hooks, and film asks for a solo moment where the stage could lean on momentum. Jon M. Chu and Schwartz used the new songs to give each woman a private center of gravity, Elphaba making peace with a home that never made peace with her, Glinda finally puncturing the bubble she has hidden inside. Both are hushed, inward numbers, closer to confession than to spectacle, and that is the tell: part two needed interiority where part one could simply raise the roof. It is careful work, and work the first movie never had to do, which tells you which half was thinner to begin with.
Two Audiences, Two Scorecards
So the gap starts to make sense. Critics tend to grade the craft: pacing, balance, whether the connective tissue between the songs shows its seams, and in part two those seams are the point of stress. The Wizard of Oz callbacks that felt inevitable on stage have to be set up a second time on screen, time skips forward with little warning, and a reviewer watching for craft will feel every one of those joints. Audiences are grading something else, which is whether the ending pays off the two hours they already loved. For most of them it does. I will admit I landed closer to the crowd than to the critics here, mostly because the ending is the part I came back for, and it holds. They came for Elphaba and Glinda to reach the version of themselves the first film promised, and the movie delivers that with two performers, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, who are somehow even better in the harder half. The Hawk landed the same way this month, with critics grading the execution and audiences grading the time they had already spent with it.
None of this makes For Good a failure. It opened to 165 million dollars, the biggest debut a Broadway adaptation has ever had, and it is now sitting at number one on Netflix, which is exactly where a title this beloved should be. What it makes is a case study in how a decision made in a boardroom, years before a frame was shot, sets the terms a review later reads as taste. Universal split one musical into two movies and gave itself two opening weekends. The cost was quiet and structural: one film would get the songs everyone already knew, and the other would get the harder job of ending well. For Good got the harder job. On the evidence of that 97, it mostly did it. The friendship the whole show rests on only lands if you believe these two women would break each other's hearts and forgive it, and Erivo and Grande make you believe both. The Devil Wears Prada 2 got the same backwards treatment, blamed for a flatness that was the whole point of the film.