Long before Wicked became a Broadway smash-hit in 2003, Disney had a history of near misses with the Oz books. Walt himself was pipped to the rights to make a movie version of L. Frank Baum’s first book in the 1930s. And ironically, 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz was greenlit at MGM because of the success of Disney’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.
Later, the studio picked up the rights to the rest of Baum’s series but only came out with The Rainbow Road To Oz, a proposed 1950s live-action feature that never came to fruition. It was only after the books entered the public domain in 1977 that Disney made 1985’s Return To Oz, a cult classic that didn’t go over nearly as well as hoped with audiences and critics at the time.
Based on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist origin story, Wicked was produced by Universal Pictures’ stage division, so there was never much chance of another studio optioning it. However, its success influenced Disney’s output in other small ways in the years immediately after, like producing the 2005 TV movie The Muppets’ Wizard Of Oz or somehow casting Elphaba breakout Idina Menzel as the only character who doesn’t sing in 2007’s Enchanted.
But there’s a broader trend of Disney reacting to Wicked, especially since Universal announced it was pressing ahead with the movie adaptation. For this feature, we’re looking at the film stories behind three movies that were either influenced by the musical or seemingly greenlit especially to compete with Universal’s film. Because if Disney didn’t come up with Wicked, they’d have to have a go at their own…
Oz The Great And Powerful (2013)
At first, Oz The Great And Powerful was entirely separate from Wicked. Screenwriter Mitchell Kapner had pitched an origin story for the Wizard as a passion project for many years to no avail. He later told The Hollywood Reporter that when Wicked came along, he thought he’d ‘missed the boat’.
In 2009, Kapner brought his pitch to producer Joe Roth, the former Disney studio chief who was at that time working on Tim Burton’s remake of Alice In Wonderland. Roth felt the project was the rare example of a fairy tale movie with a male protagonist. Sony Pictures passed on the film, but Roth got development going at Disney.
The project was codenamed “Brick” while Kapner got the script together, for the express reason that Disney didn’t want any other studios fast-tracking rival Oz projects – especially not Universal and Wicked.
Sam Raimi boarded the project in 2010, after reading the script and ascertaining that it wasn’t a remake of the 1939 film, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. Early trade reports had Robert Downey Jr attached to play Oscar Diggs, the circus magician who becomes the Wizard, but Downey declined the role. Johnny Depp also passed, and James Franco, who’d previously starred in Raimi’s Spider-Man films, was cast instead.
Also in the cast, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams all play witches who are taken in by Franco’s womanising conman to one degree or another. Zach Braff provides the voice of a flying monkey, Joey King plays a China doll, and yes, Bruce Campbell turns up for a quick cameo too.
Charting Oscar’s journey to the Land of Oz, Oz The Great And Powerful takes a different tack to The Wizard Of Oz and Wicked. It’s not a musical, for starters. But while callbacks to the former abounded, studio lawyers kept a close eye any possible infringements.
Warner Bros, the 1939 film’s legal owner, laid out strict conditions that even went so far as distinguishing the shade of green used for the Wicked Witch of the West’s skin. It makes you wonder if Warner has set similar stipulations for Wicked Part One, which also features references to the iconic movie.
But if there’s any sign that Oz was still important to Disney, it’s that the movie outlived three studio chairmen, which is unusual for a big project like this. It was commissioned towards the end of Dick Cook’s time in charge, started rolling during Rich Ross’ short, flop-strewn tenure, and released shortly after Alan Horn took over.
Whether you like or loathe this particular take, there can’t be many who would argue it’s not Raimi’s weakest movie. It has aesthetic similarities with Disney and Roth’s Alice and was expected to match its billion-dollar blockbuster gross, but it’s also got the same sense of a great filmmaker going through the motions.
That’s not to say it’s not recognisably Raimi’s. The director’s sense of humour is present and correct, and he had to soften some scary scenes in the edit to achieve Disney’s preferred PG rating. Plus, coming off a cancelled Spider-Man sequel that would have been shot in 3D, he does some interesting stuff with the format here instead. Most of all, as some contemporary reviewers noted, the plot structure of Oz is wildly similar to Army Of Darkness.
One key difference is that it’s harder to root for its uniquely unlikable protagonist. Where Wicked’s take elaborates on the “man behind the curtain” as a gaslighting despot, Oz cheers on its lead as he lies to women and cheats his way through the story. It wouldn’t have been a strong look if he’d been played by anyone else, either.
Hot on the heels of producer Marc Platt announcing that the Wicked adaptation was moving forward at Universal, Oz The Great And Powerful opened in early 2013 to mixed reviews and a decent box-office return. On a $215 million budget, it made less than half of what Alice In Wonderland did, but comfortably outperformed some of Disney’s big-budget films that bombed on either side of it.
And last weekend, Disney+ subscribers may have seen the film bumped to the top of the streamer’s banner as Wicked cleaned up in cinemas. Return To Oz is also streaming, but this one is still serving its purpose as the more commercial take.
Maleficent (2014)
Just over a year later, Disney released a film that was much more obviously influenced by Wicked. Disney legend Don Hahn coined the idea of an animated origin story based around the villainous witch who was created for the 1950 take on Sleeping Beauty. And the success of a certain Wicked Witch-centric musical shaped development from the start.
Elsewhere, producer Sean Bailey, who would later become Disney’s studio president, had a parallel idea for a live-action feature that made Maleficent an anti-hero. It was Bailey who got Angelina Jolie interested in starring, and somewhere along the line, the two ideas became one project.
Hahn told News 4 JAX: ‘We thought we could do a Wicked thing with Maleficent and show her backstory. That was just the germ of the idea, and it sat in animation for a while. We did some development and some drawings on it, but then it went pretty quickly over to live-action, where it sat.’
At one point in the 2000s, the Alice In Wonderland dream team of Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton were working on the film, but it was paused due to Burton’s other commitments. After Alice leapfrogged it into cinemas, Burton departed the project, leaving Disney extending offers to filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky and David O Russell.
Meanwhile, another Alice alum, production designer Robert Stromberg, was working on Oz The Great And Powerful after Joe Roth persuaded him to delay directing and work on Raimi’s desired practical sets. Roth repaid the favour by promoting him to the director’s chair on Maleficent instead.
Jolie officially signed up as both star and executive producer, pocketing a cool $33 million salary and making out as the biggest-paid movie star of that year. The film also stars Elle Fanning as Aurora, the original film’s sleeping beauty; Sharlto Copley as a more antagonistic King Stefan; and Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, and Juno Temple as three well-meaning but clumsy pixie godmothers.
Again, it’s a film that feels of a set with Alice In Wonderland’s CG-heavy aesthetic, and it’s not a musical either. The only Sleeping Beauty song that makes it in here is Lana del Rey’s moody cover of the love theme ‘Once Upon A Dream’, and that’s just over the end credits.
Marketed with taglines like ‘Don’t believe the fairy tale’, the film hews to Wicked’s revisionist style, but colours its fantasy story with an unusually dark and heavy traumatic backstory for its title character. Some reviewers have noted that the movie has undertones of a rape-revenge story, particularly in light of Jolie’s wrenching performance during an early incident where Stefan drugs Maleficent and cuts off her wings while she sleeps.
Responding to this reading on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2014, Jolie explained: ‘The question was asked: “What could make a woman become so dark and lose all sense of her maternity, her womanhood, and her softness?” […] We were very conscious, the writer and I, that [the scene] was a metaphor for rape.’
Although this is 180 degrees different from Oz’s treatment of its female characters, the film ultimately keeps it light enough for that PG rating again. And while the budget ballooned from $180m to a reported $263m, Maleficent was a proportionally bigger hit for Disney, grossing $758m worldwide.
By the time the underperforming 2019 sequel Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil arrived, Disney had ramped up the straight-up live-action remake production line to where it came in the wake of Dumbo, Aladdin, and The Lion King.
Still, the idea of casting Oscar winners as female Disney villains has given us at least one other successful experiment in 2021’s Cruella, which was more fun than “maybe the Dalmatians had it coming” should have been.
Moana 2 (2024)
Bear with us on this one – we’re moving into low-stakes conspiracy theorising and speculation about how Disney has stuck their oar in again.
More than 10 years on from Maleficent being presented as Disney’s answer to Wicked, Universal has got Wicked Part One out in cinemas. Funnily enough, umpteen cinema screenings each day are preceded by an exclusive trailer for Disney’s live-action Snow White remake, due in cinemas this March, but that’s not the only way the Mouse has stuck its oar in.
Older readers may remember that Moana 2 wasn’t Moana 2 as recently as the start of 2024. Indeed, the follow-up was first announced in December 2020 as “a long-form musical-comedy series” set to debut on Disney+. A couple of years later, Disney began developing a live-action remake with Dwayne Johnson reprising his role as demi-god Maui. That’s still going ahead and should be in cinemas in summer 2026.
It was only in February this year that Disney CEO Bob Iger announced Moana 2 would arrive in cinemas worldwide on 29th November 2024 (that’s today). This just so happened to be the date that Universal had staked out for Wicked Part One since March 2023.
Coming in a year where Disney racked up $11.4 billion of operating losses from its streaming service and 2023’s 100th-anniversary slate underwhelmed at the box office, it’s not all that surprising that the studio might repurpose a TV show as a theatrical sequel. But the quick turnaround required to make Moana 2 seaworthy for a cinema release is conspicuous. Fishy, even.
A few months later, Universal blinked and moved Wicked forward to 22nd November, up against Gladiator II’s US opening. ‘Glicked’ hasn’t blown up like ‘Barbenheimer’ did in July 2023, but going against Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals sequel feels more like good-natured counterprogramming than sticking two musicals on the same day.
Meanwhile, even the more positive reviews of Moana 2 have remarked that it feels like a full-length series hurriedly crammed into a 100-minute movie. Because that’s what it is. What we’re wondering is whether Disney had to scramble for something to put out opposite a film it was seemingly anticipating for the last 20 years.
As back-up plans go, a sequel to one of its most beloved movies of the last ten years isn’t bad going, but as Simon noted in his review, it’s not a patch on Moana.
Read more: Moana 2 review | Disney takes a step back
Both films will wash their face and then some at the worldwide box office, although we suspect Wicked will have better word of mouth. And the cherry on top of a weirdly competitive press circuit is Dwayne Johnson’s comments earlier this week.
Amid reports of cinemas asking audiences not to sing along during screenings of Wicked, Johnson – the man who once tried to book his B-list DC villain at the top of the card to fight Superman – changed the hierarchy of cinema etiquette forever by telling BBC News: ‘Sing! You’ve paid your hard-earned money for a ticket, and you’ve gone into a musical, and you’re into it. Especially if you love music, that’s the fun part.’
(Anyone else miss the days when he might have said ‘IT DOESN’T MATTER if you sing in the cinema…’ instead?)
In any case, cinema history would be very different if Walt Disney got to make his animated Oz movie back in the 1930s. Moving in different directions, Oz The Great And Powerful and Maleficent can both be seen as the company “where magic lives” reckoning with the resurgent popularity of the one that got away.
And if the Moana of it all seems tenous next to those, here’s something else. On that call in February, Iger also dated a sequel to Disney’s even bigger 2016 hit, Zootropolis. It shouldn’t take magic powers to guess, but yep, Zootropolis 2 is currently on track to open within days of Wicked Part Two in November 2025.
