wicked: for good

what the second half is

act two of the stage musical, which is a considerably harder piece of material than act one. the first film is a friendship forming; this one is that friendship failing under political pressure, with elphaba in exile and glinda occupying the position of official goodness in a regime she knows to be lying. it is darker, slower and less immediately pleasurable, and the reviews reflected that.

it is also the half that asks the most of glinda. the first film gave grande a comic role with a technical singing part underneath it. this one gives her a character who spends most of the running time complicit and aware of it, which is a different job entirely.

the two new songs

stephen schwartz wrote two songs that do not exist in the stage version. no place like home goes to elphaba. the girl in the bubble goes to glinda, and it is the first time in the property's twenty-year history that the character has had a solo number about her own position rather than about the plot.

the ending, explained

glinda returns to the emerald city after the melting and hands the wizard a green bottle that belonged to elphaba's mother, which he recognises — it establishes that elphaba is his daughter. she exiles him from oz, sends him off with dorothy, and then deals with madame morrible, having her taken to the cages that once held the animals she helped imprison.

elphaba is not dead. the melting was staged — a trapdoor, and fiyero, alive as the scarecrow, waiting on the other side of it. the two of them leave for whatever is beyond oz, and glinda never learns. the last image is a flashback to the pair of them at shiz, which recreates the musical's poster.

the cruelty of the ending, and the reason it works, is that glinda's grief is real and unnecessary and she carries it for the rest of her life. she does the right thing at every turn in the last twenty minutes and gets nothing for it.

the money

the opening was the largest ever recorded for a broadway adaptation, beating the first film's own record from a year earlier. it did not sustain at the first film's rate, which is the usual shape for a part two of anything.

the awards

grande took a second golden globe nomination for best supporting actress, and did not win. the more consequential result came at the grammys in february 2026, where defying gravity — recorded for the first film, sung live on set — won best pop duo/group performance, giving her a third grammy. the full awards record is here.