The silver screen is not new to presenting musicals. From the first movie musical (and first movie with sound in general) “The Jazz Singer” in 1927 to “Singing In The Rain” in 1952, to “Dear Evan Hansen” in 2021, movie musicals have been a staple in cinema.
However, not all movie musicals are created equal…or even good for that matter; for example: “Grease” which came out in 1978, and is terribly written from its characters to its questionably and morally awful ending, and “Mean Girls” which came out at the beginning of 2024, which I will explain where it is lacking later in this article. And so, in honor of “Wicked: For Good” coming out recently, I’ve decided to explain how 2024’s “Wicked” succeeds as a movie musical while 2024’s “Mean Girls” fails horribly.
“Mean Girls “2024” combines the 2004 movie and the 2018 musical into one tonally offputting mess. The film stars Renee Rapp as Regina George (whom she portrayed on Broadway from 2019-2020), Angourie Rice as Cady Heron, Auliʻi Cravalho as Janis Ian, Jaquel Spivey as Damian Hubbard, and Christopher Briney as Aaron Samuels with Tina Fey and Tim Meadows reprising their roles from the 2004 movie as Ms. Norbury and Principal Duvall.
The film is seemingly ashamed of being both a comedy and a musical due to its, at times, overdramatic tone and needless melodrama along with turning almost every single song into a generic pop number instead of letting the songs have their own musical identity. And it doesn’t help the music sound any better when your main character can’t sing any of her numbers.
Angourie Rice is a very talented actress, and acting wise, she does the most competent job in the film, but this poor girl cannot sing for the life of her, and when she does, she’s autotuned. And since the filmmakers know she can’t sing, they cut most of her songs or just cut her parts in the songs, like with the song “Apex Predator”.
“Apex Predator” is a song in the first act of Mean Girls in which there is a duality between how Cady views the mean girls versus how Janis sees them. It’s a really well made song and it really shows off how naive Cady’s character is by trusting the mean girls trio. However in the 2024 version, it’s a number sung by Janis and Damian instead of Janis and Cady. It’s such a gross misunderstanding of the number because now we have no other viewpoint of the mean girls and Cady doesn’t get any character growth, truly a lose lose situation. The whole movie is riddled with misunderstanding. It doesn’t understand what made the original movie’s story funny and it doesn’t understand what made the musical so good.
On the complete opposite side however we have “Wicked” which came out in November of 2024. This movie not only completely accepts its identity as a musical, it also fixes some narrative weaknesses within the first act. Every single song from the first act is kept intact and is in the movie without needless cutting or meddling with because the film understands that there is a reason those musical numbers were created in the first place.
The performances are all top notch, which makes sense because almost every cast member has a background in musical theatre or singing in some way. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in particular steal the show as Elphaba and Glinda and you immediately can tell why they were chosen for their roles purely because of how talented they are.
Jonathan Bailey and Ethan Slater, who play “Fiyero” and “Boq” respectively, also show off their musical chops masterfully and give fantastic performances with a lot of soul in them. And even people like Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh, who feel like stunt casts, work wonderfully within the story and really put their all into playing “Oz” and “Madame Morrible” and don’t at all feel like they are dragging down the film .
The film has a runtime of almost 3 hours which might sound like a lot (because it is) but that actually does the film a lot of favors because it gives the film time to have slower character building scenes. For example, in the original musical, Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship kinda comes out of nowhere and you don’t really buy their relationship. The film fixes this by adding scenes of just the two of them talking, like the scene before the song “Popular” starts.
The movie was also heavily marketed as a musical and didn’t try to hide it like with Mean Girls 2024, which tried to market the movie as a serious teen drama. Wicked isn’t a perfect movie by any means, the lighting, editing and color grading range from subpar to abysmal, but the film does do well at staying true to its genre.
“Wicked: For Good” came out on Nov. 21, and though the lighting and editing is still bad and though the story of the second act is much weaker, especially due to the extended runtime only adding more issues instead of fixing them such as the inclusion of two very subpar original songs, the movie gets one thing right, which is the music. The musical performances are singlehandedly the best parts of both Wicked movies no matter how bad the pacing and lighting is thanks to the awe inspiring musical performances from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.
We’ve been stuck in a dark hole when it comes to movie musicals where most of them aren’t good and misunderstand the source material, such as “Cats” (2019), “Dear Evan Hansen” (2021) and “Les Miserables” (2012), but I hope that Wicked sets a precedent for Hollywood going forward and shows that yes, there is still a market for movie musicals and yes, they can still be good movies.