by Chris Snellgrove
| Published
newly, evil It was the third biggest opening of the year, trailing only major Disney blockbusters Inside out 2 and Deadpool Wolverine. Blockbuster movies can be unpredictable, as Disney discovered when The Marvels was released after the previous film Captain Marvel He earned more than a billion dollars. It left fans and critics alike wondering why this particular musical was so successful. I think the reason is simple: thanks to its literary origins, evil It finally fulfills the failed Star Wars promise of using a prequel to flesh out an iconic villain in a beloved series.
naturally, evil The film has one big advantage that even Star Wars didn't have: the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of previous adaptations. Written by Gregory Maguire Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch From the West in 1995 as A Wizard of Oz prequel, and was made into a successful Broadway musical in 2003. The latter film is clearly focused on adapting the musical for the big screen but uses its massive runtime (the first film only adapts half of the play but has a longer runtime than the entire Broadway stage) to adapt ) to include more details from the book, creating the kind of strong introduction we all honestly wanted The imaginary threat And its consequences could have been.
Obviously, Maguire wrote evil Years ago The imaginary threat released, but it's still surprising that they both had the same purpose, which was to provide a more complete origin story for one of cinema's greatest supervillains. However, the main failure of the Star Wars series is that it has not changed our understanding of it Darth Vaderjust giving the stupidest reason in the world, which is that he is a wife's man who can be easily deceived, due to his descent into the dark side.
By contrast, the novel, play, and now film Wickedness dramatically changes our understanding of the “wicked” witch by presenting her as a sympathetic defender of the underdog (and superior apes, for that matter). We see her ready to stand up to a corrupt wizard whose only real power comes from his fascist regime and the shadowy Gestapo, a far cry from the creepy green girl who threatened Dorothy in 1939.
in other words, evil The story makes a great introduction to Wizard of Oz Precisely because he is ready to surprise us with a version of this famous villain that we did not expect. This was relatively easy because the first cinematic depiction of the character presented her as nothing more than a sarcastic villain, someone who casually threatens to kill a little girl and her little dog as well. Darth Vader similarly started out as a one-note villain, and while the rest of the original trilogy added a bit of depth to his backstory, he still spent almost every one of his scenes as a monster whose mask and heavy breathing still couldn't hide how much scenery he always chewed.
As we all know, the Star Wars prequels didn't do anything surprising with Darth Vader. He went from being weird to being violent to being weird and violent. Other than finding out how eerily similar he was to the school shooter, there wasn't much new about his character.
evilBy contrast, it fleshes out the Wicked Witch's relationship with other famous characters while giving her sympathetic motivations. By the time she takes over the house with her hit song “Defying Gravity,” the audience is ready to side with Hollywood's oldest villain as she fights for those who have… lost (Quite literally, in some cases) their voice.
All this to say so evil He finally does right with Wicked Witch what George Lucas failed to do with Darth Vader: change what we know about the villain in order to make the premise new and exciting. Unfortunately, complete generation A number of filmmakers have tried to imitate Lucas's style, giving us similarly mediocre introductory films The rise of Hannibal This similarly did nothing interesting or surprising with the charismatic villains. A successful prequel requires creative and original writing, and if most Hollywood studios can't provide that, they'll be the only ones to mourn their box office flops.
After all, just as no one mourns for the wicked, no one mourns for the lazy. And there nothing Lazier than the Cookie prequels that are afraid to take risks with their most popular characters. However, Hollywood is full of laziness, and as the Wicked Witch herself might say, what a world.
