Wicked Fans All Have The Same Complaint About The Movies (And They’re Not Wrong)

On November 24, 2025 — three days after “Wicked: For Good” hit theaters and created magic at the box office — an account called @DiscussingFish on the social media platform X posted a joke about the movie. “Jon M. Chu confirmed that he forgot to do color grading for both films,” wrote the account, which clearly mimics accounts like DiscussingFilm.

Cho himself responded to the post elsewhere and called it “clickbait,” but it also links to a Variety article about how Cho forgot to name a “cut” while filming a particularly emotional scene between Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba Thropp and Ariana Grande-Butera’s Glinda the Good Witch in “Wicked: For Good.” The reason this joke happened in the first place is because the colors in “Wicked: For Good” look bad.

Other people on X have noticed this issue as well. More specifically, fans were upset by the visuals of practical sets that were supposedly used in both of Chu’s “Wicked” films — 2024’s “Wicked: Part One” is the other — based on the cinematic score we got. User Xthediegocrespo reposted shots of the brightly colored sets with the caption, “Director and DP should be sued for malpractice,” referring to both Chu and the film’s cinematographer Alice Brooks. When asked, he followed up with some solutions: “Proper lighting, lens, [and] Blocking out the actors within the scene makes a big difference. A lot of movies shot digitally (with lots of visual effects) look great. It was poorly executed with Wicked.”

I don’t disagree with any of this, and I also think this is part of a larger problem. The “Wicked” films, based in part on one of the most famous color films in history, are no visual celebrations, and worse, they’re not alone.

“The Wizard of Oz,” produced in 1939, is known for its stunning use of Technicolor, showcasing the famous Ruby Slippers, the Yellow Brick Road, and the Emerald City. Unfortunately, no one These cinematic treasures are given respectful treatment in any of Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” films. The Emerald City is a muddy shade of green, the yellow brick road is muted (perhaps because of the way the film associates it with oppression), and those ruby ​​slippers stick to the traditional silver presentation (although they briefly turn red in “Wicked: For Good”). However, it would be foolish to pretend that this problem is in any way related to the “Wicked” films. Blockbuster movies only Look like this now.

Both large and small screen feature frankly insulting examples of sludgy and poor CGI effects that blur together and dull colors to make everything look muffled and awful. He thought, I don’t know, almost any Superhero movie, and you’ll know what I mean; Even in 2019, an episode of the final season of Game of Thrones titled “The Long Night” had none of its colors labeled, leaving it almost black. Movies like “The Wizard of Oz” and other colorful classics like “Singin’ in the Rain” seem like bygone relics of bygone eras, because every time a new big-budget film is released, we’re all treated to muted CGI and flat colors instead of the visual feasts you imagine. He wants From the big screen saga. It’s disappointing for a movie that uses so much color in its marketing – Pink for Glinda and green for Elphaba – Everything looks lifeless when you see it in action.

The worst part is that, even with all the agonizing I’ve been doing about “Wicked: For Good” and what it looks like, I actually enjoyed a lot of this movie. Ariana Grande Butera and Cynthia Erivo are both excellent, the titular friendship song “For Good” left me a little vague, and I now agree that it was a good idea to split “Wicked” into two films. However, there’s something I want to harp on again about “Wicked: For Good” — it requires a Broadway show to run no more than an hour long, More than double This uptime for no reason at all.

If we’re going to complain that movies look flat and muted these days, thanks to digital filmmaking and visual effects, we should also Be angry that blockbuster movies refuse to keep their running times reasonable. I’m pretty sure the movie would make the same amount of money as a feature length or a short, and I’m even more certain that “Wicked: For Good” would have been a much better movie if it had seriously condensed everything, cut frankly unmissable new songs written for Erivo and Grande-Butera (by Broadway show creator and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, no less), and tightened up the narrative. Is it bad that “Wicked: For Good” looks like this? Yes. Is it so? worst That “Wicked: For Good” looks like this and keeps you sitting there for over two hours too? This is a final and resounding yes.

“Wicked: For Good” is in theaters now.