Wicked, or Wicked-Part One as it is now known, is one of the most anticipated films of the 2024 festive season as millions of Wizard of Oz fans look forward to visiting the musical’s fantastic representation of the Emerald City.
The two films (the second one is scheduled for release in November 2025) will focus on the transformation of Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) from an innocent green-skinned college girl into the dreaded Witch of the West, and her conflict with the snobby Galinda/Glinda Upland (Ariana Grande), who herself goes on to become Glinda the Good.
Ahead of its premiere in November 2024, Universal released both the first trailer for Wicked and its official theatrical poster, its artwork featuring Elphaba donning her infamous pointed black hat and Glinda whispering into her ear with a cupped hand.
While the poster closely recreates the one used to promote of the original Stephen Schwartz penned musical, many fans were unhappy about the changes made to the image, such as Elphaba’s eyes no longer being covered by the brim of her hat and, perhaps most notably, the fact that her enchanting red smirk was now a lipstick-less green.
Following its reveal, fan art quickly hit social media as viewers moved to correct these discrepancies – and while most of their attempts focused on bringing the film’s poster more in line with its inspiration, some notably decided to take a dark turn with their efforts. For example, one fan produced an AI video from the poster which showed the two lead actresses fighting, while others still took to using their editing skills to mock Erivo’s anatomy.
Enter Erivo, who rather than either ignoring these edits or recognizing that, for the most part, they were made in order to pay homage to the original Wicked musical, instead took massive offense to the fact that fans had altered her image.
Taking to the auto-deleting ‘Stories’ feature of her personal Instagram account on October 15th, the actress’s first took aim at the above poster edit from Wickedmexicofans and declared that the ‘musical accurate poster’ was “the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen. Equal to that awful AI of us fighting. Equal to people posting the question, ‘Is your p*** green.”
From there, the actress broke into a all-out rant, declaring, “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”
“The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION,” she argued. “I am a real-life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer… because, without words, we communicate with our eyes. Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes, is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.”
However, rather than receiving a one-sided outpouring of support, Erivo instead found her post met not just by her supporters, but also numerous Wicked fans who believed she may have been overreacting to the edit, which they correctly noted were being made not out of malice, but again, out of a desire to see the live-action poster conform with the original Broadway one.
“I don’t see the harm in this, it’s just a simple edit to show how it would be if it was identical to the original?” questioned one such fan. “I think this person is just a fan who didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” one person commented.
And from a neutral perspective, it should be noted that the fans are clearly right. Nothing in the edit or the post directly attacks the actress. Truly, all Wickedmexicofans did was give Elphaba red lipstick and cover eyes.
Of course, as seen in the conclusion of her above post, Erivo doesn’t think so, and has instead chosen to foment an absolute non-troversy.
Ultimately, Erivo would close out her attack on fans by sharing the film’s poster.
“Let me put this right here,” she said, “to remind you and cleanse your palette.”
Interestingly enough, her strong comments about the fan edits haven’t been shared by any of her “Wicked” co-stars, including Peter Dinklage, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater, and the aforementioned Grande (who Erivo even directly tagged in her original Instagram rant).
Universal Pictures’ cinematic take on Wicked is currently on track to begin walking the yellow brick road on November 22nd.