Review | Wicked: For Good movie review – Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo dazzle in Part 2

Jon M. Chu’s follow-up to his 2024 smash shines like a rainbow with splendid visuals and acting. Could Grande and Erivo bag Oscars this time?

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Ariana Grande (left) and Cynthia Erivo in a still from Wicked: For Good (category: I), directed by Jon M. Chu and co-starring Michelle Yeoh.

Published: 1:00am, 19 Nov 2025

4/5 stars

Jon M. Chu’s Wicked returns for its concluding part, following the sensational box office, 10 Oscar nominations and two wins of last year’s prequel.

It is hard not to predict similar results for Wicked: For Good, a dazzlingly colourful extravaganza adapted from the stage show smash and led by two powerful performances from Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.

While it does not quite have the novelty element of part one – or the emotional heft – Wicked: For Good is a fiercely inventive work that pays dutiful homage to its classic 1939 source, The Wizard of Oz.

Picking up where the last film left off, Elphaba (Erivo) is the banished, green-skinned Wicked Witch, her name smeared by the charlatan Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum). She is first seen attacking those who are building the famed Yellow Brick Road, further fuelling hysteria around her.

She just wants to save the animals of Oz, who are similarly being ostracised, a campaign steered by the Wizard and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the former dean of sorcery at Shiz University who first tutored Elphaba.

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