Wicked’s road to the screen has been a long one, but has Disney been reacting to it since the musical first hit Broadway? NB: This feature contains spoilers for Wicked Part One, Oz The Great And Powerful, and Maleficent. Long before Wicked became a Broadway smash-hit in 2003, Disney had a history of near misses ... The three movies Disney made instead of Wicked
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 certainly 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. They fixed that in another movie later, but we’ll get to that.
More importantly, there’s a broader trend of Disney reacting to Wicked, especially since Universal announced it was pressing ahead with the movie adaptation. When Wicked: Part One hit cinemas last year, it went head-to-head with Moana 2, a hastily retooled feature film version of “a long-form musical-comedy series” intended for Disney+.
A year later, Wicked: For Good is in cinemas, (read Maria’s review here) and next week, the House of Mouse will release Zootropolis 2, another movie that was hastily greenlit instead of a planned streaming series. Disney CEO Bob Iger announced both films on an investor call in February 2024, set suspiciously close to release dates that Universal had staked for the Wicked movies in early 2023.
It makes us wonder whether Disney had to scramble for something to put out opposite a film it was seemingly anticipating for the last 20 years. In 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.
While Kapner got the script together, Disney codenamed the script “Brick”, for the express reason that it 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. Eventually, James Franco, who’d previously starred in Raimi’s Spider-Man films, took the role 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.
Last year, on the weekend Wicked: Part One cleaned up in cinemas worldwide, Disney+ subscribers may have seen the film bumped to the top of the streamer’s banner. Return To Oz is also streaming, but this one is still serving its purpose as the more commercial take.
Frozen (2013)
Later that year, Wicked was a clear forerunner to a movie Disney had been trying to develop almost as long as an Oz – its adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen.
The film was originally envisioned as part of a hybrid live-action/animated biopic about Andersen, but Walt Disney’s collaborator Samuel Goldwyn went off to make the live-action 1952 movie Hans Christian Andersen independently instead. This prompted Disney to shelve several adjacent animated projects, including The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid.
The project cooled for many decades, until the 1989 feature version of The Little Mermaid kicked off the studio’s 1990s Renaissance period. It ramped up considerably in 2008 when Pixar’s John Lasseter became Disney’s chief creative officer and was wowed by concept art from previous attempts.
Anna And The Snow Queen, as it was then called, was in active development as a traditional hand-drawn animated project throughout the early 2010s, but gradually evolved into a computer-animated feature that bore more than a few similarities with Wicked.
It’s by no means a direct, one-to-one take-off. The change to a one-word adjective title came after Tangled, so that’s at least one step in between it and Wicked. The decision to change Elsa the Snow Queen from a villain to a protagonist reportedly came organically out of story meetings with Lasseter and the Disney animation brain trust.
Josh Gad boarded the project as the voice of a snowman called Olaf early on and told MSN: ‘I was originally involved in the project when it was a 2D effort and it was called Anna and the Snow Queen, and it was completely different.’
He elaborated: ‘Megan Mullally was playing Elsa and it wasn’t really about sisterhood at all. I think it had more to do with the source material of Hans Christian Andersen’s story. When I did that version, Olaf was a different character entirely.’
At some point or other, the film became more about the relationship between the two lead female characters, with a more sympathetic take on Elsa. In the process, Mullally was replaced by Idina Menzel, who happened to originate the role of Elphaba in Wicked on Broadway.
Co-directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, the film is structured similarly to Wicked in that its biggest musical number comes at the film’s midpoint. The film’s songs are written by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, but “Let It Go” couldn’t feel any more Disney’s answer to “Defying Gravity” if both songs were sung by the same person – and they were!
However, in a 2013 interview for Den Of Geek, Lee told me: ‘Elsa was much more of a dominant character when we began, like a straightforward villain, and with “Let It Go”, we were inspired by them writing that song.
‘We were so blown away by it, we really wanted it to be powerful and to resonate, so I went and rewrote the whole first act, just for that song. There was a lot of back and forth.’
Contemporary reviews of Frozen noted its similarities with Wicked, then in its tenth year of making huge amounts of money on Broadway. However much Disney did or didn’t crib from the show, it paid off massively, giving the studio a $1.2 billion-dollar hit and Oscars for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.
By far the most successful of the three movies we’re covering here, it spawned a 2019 sequel (which had a cooler response but a similarly humungous box-office haul) and just this week, we’ve seen the studio firming up plans for Frozen 3 and Frozen 4 by paying stars Menzel, Gad, and Kristen Bell $60m each for reprising their voice roles.
Read more: Frozen | $180m spent on lead voice talent for next two films
Between decades of development and more recent influences throughout production, Frozen's success doesn’t only come out of Wicked. But it would be hard not to acknowledge its influence on pop culture ahead of Disney unlocking a different point-of-view on a magical character who’s traditionally a villain.
Maleficent (2014)
Just over six months later, Disney released a film that was much more obviously influenced by Wicked. Heck, her name was already an adjective.
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.’
During the 2000s, the Alice In Wonderland dream team of Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton worked on the film, but 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 deepfake production line to where it came just after remakes of Dumbo, Aladdin, and The Lion King.
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.
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, Frozen, and Maleficent can both be seen as the company “where magic lives” reckoning with the resurgent popularity of the one that got away.
A version of this feature was previously published in 2024.
