Wicked: For Good - Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande on Theme...

How Wicked: For Good Reflects Themes Of Good And Evil Explained By Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande

Glinda and Elphaba in Wicked: For Good poster

By Allison Hambrick Published 2 hours ago

An avid comic book fan since she first read "Stan Lee's Soapbox," Allison Hambrick is your friendly neighborhood generalist writer. Journalism, editing, media production, copywriting—she does it all. From her very first blog post about Smallville as a primary schooler, Allison developed a passion for superheroes and the entertainment industry at large.

Majoring in writing and film at SCAD, Allison put her skills to work writing, editing, podcasting, and more. Currently, she moonlights as an editor at the ASHRAE Journal by day and Screen Rant by night. Allison also previously worked for Warner Bros. Entertainment and for Disney.

Through her writing, she hopes to inspire, to entertain, and to empower others to be the best versions of themselves, and her mission in life is to make Stan proud. In her free time, she enjoys reading, video game design, traveling, and spending time outside with her dogs, Loki and Elphaba. Allison is fluent in movie quotes, and her favorite film is Superman II.

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The darker half of Wicked's story, Wicked: For Good follows Elphaba Thropp after defying the Wizard of Oz and being branded the Wicked Witch of the West. Directed by Jon M. Chu, the film stars Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Marissa Bode, Ethan Slater, Michelle Yeoh, and Jeff Goldblum. Both For Good and the previous installment adapt the Wicked Broadway musical, which in turn adapted the 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

All three iterations of the story grapple with broader themes of what it means to be good and how propaganda can obscure a corrupt regime, though the musical has notably sanded down the edges of the novel. Recently, Erivo, who portrays Elphaba, discussed how these themes shaped her iteration of the witch: "I’ve never seen Elphaba as an evil character, but I think [...] what was clarified for me is that perception is everything."

"What we see as good, and what we see as evil can be warped and shifted, depending on who’s, who we are looking at, and through what eyes, through what lens we’re looking through," continued Erivo. "So if we, depending on how you feel about a certain type of person, depending on how you feel about the skin the person is living in, depending on how you feel the person sounds or looks, is what, is the lens we look through."

Likewise, Erivo noted that the concept of goodness is subjective. "How we use the word ‘good,’ is it really good? Or is it a sort of, an apparition of good?" the actress mused. "The difference between what good actually is, and what good can be perceived to be, and what evil actually is, and what evil can be perceived to be. And who we can actually lay the blame on, and how easy it is to push it on someone else."

Glinda in a ballgown and tiara looking dismayed while surrounded by anti-Elphaba propaganda in Wicked: For Good

For her part, Grande, who plays Elphaba's estranged friend and a pawn of the Wizard, stated: "I love the question the movie asks." She then added she appreciates how For Good "invites people to consider why those labels are kind of projected so easily."

"People are kind of the accumulation of all of their experiences, of their hurt and of their things, and sort of we live in a time [when] everything is erased of context and humanness, and things are boiled down to a quick soundbite or a quick headline," Grande said, addressing the politically tinged message of the film. "And I think that, while people can do good things, and people can do wicked things, it’s an interesting theme in the story, to ask people to look for the humanness, or what might be on the other side. You never really know the whole story. You don’t know."

Though Elphaba's crusade against the Wizard is justified, the whole of Oz doesn't see it that way, and Glinda is forced to choose between being good and performing goodness. Their shared journey reaches its climactic finale when Wicked: For Good releases in theaters on November 21, 2025.

Like Follow Followed Wicked: For Good PG Drama Fantasy Romance

8/10 Release Date November 21, 2025 Runtime 137 Minutes Director Jon M. Chu Writers Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox, Gregory Maguire

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Cynthia Erivo Elphaba
Ariana Grande Glinda

Genres Drama, Fantasy, Romance Powered by

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