Best movie of 2024: Wicked

*Newspaper headline voice*: against all expectations, the musical adaptation defied gravity... and soared

The first time I saw the Wicked musical, I’d been up for something like 100 hours, having flown in to London from Sydney that morning, and spent the day interviewing the cast of Game of Thrones. Wicked, by that point, had been popular for so long that I approached the situation as more of a ticking box attitude: something big that I could say I’d seen, but one that I wasn’t particularly excited about. I thought it would be fine, but whatever garbled perception of the show I had made me convinced it wasn’t my cup of tea.

I’d made friends at the junket with the only other Australian journalist, who was equally as jetlagged as I was, and we’d gone back to the fancy hotel HBO was putting us up in and drank three martinis each. I discovered she’d never seen a musical, and convinced her to come to Wicked with me. In return she said I should come to the cool underground invite-only dance club she was going to at 3am that night. I told her I’d rather die.

“What’s it even about” she asked, as we waited in line.

“It’s about the witch from Wizard of Oz” I said wisely, “I assume how she got so evil or whatever”.

“I’ve never seen the Wizard of Oz either” she informed me. She wrote for a cool hip-hop magazine. I’m not really sure why we alone represented Australian media at the earlier junket, but I am still firmly looking away from this gifthorse and its gaping maw. We blearily settled in our seats, an air of boozy cynicism stinking around us.

By the end of No One Mourns The Wicked, I was bolt upright in my chair, absolutely blown away, riveted. I adored the show, my tiredness washed away, literally grabbing my face in my hands at the effect of Defying Gravity. When the lights went up, I looked over at my new friend and she was sound asleep. “That was great!” she lied, leaving the theatre. “There’s another half” I told her, and she pretended not to hear.

I’ve since seen Wicked again, and have maintained a genuine love for the musical - which means like many others, I approached the movie adaptation with great caution. A woman singing beautifully in green makeup while being whisked around the stage on a rope is awe-inspiring. On a movie screen, it’s not even notable - how would they capture that magic?

So, it was with great delight that I basically replicated the same experience from my first time seeing the Wicked musical in the cinema - all my cynicism blasted away with absolute delight. This time I saw it with my friend Mariota, who also hadn’t seen the musical before, but managed to remain awake. Since seeing it, we’ve sent each other a constant stream of Wicked memes, mostly about my obsession with Jonathan Bailey.

I’ve basically lived in the soundtrack (original cast recording mostly) since the film - attempting to sing every part at once to such an effect that Basil, my dog, slunk out of the room at one point. I thought my airpods had broken because they were cutting in and out, until I realised that I was just scream-singing so loudly that I was kicking off the noise awareness function.

I think it’s all a testament to the movie’s ability to capture all the delight of the musical - the beautiful dance between the characters, the subversive yet silly storyline, and the incredible songs and dancing, and make them shine on screen instead. I think the entire cast were incredible, and as people have noted before, could have easily been sent awry by a rogue James Corden style casting, tipping the balance of whimsy and darkness irrevocably into the tacky. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were both exceptional, and brought more nuance to the enemies to lovers relationship than I’d expected - what a gift closeups can be. Jonathan Bailey is perfect. My friend (unexamined parasocial relationship recipient) Bowen Yang was wonderful.

Grande in particular delighted me - she embodied Glinda, not only bringing some beautiful pathos and depth to a character designed to seem shallow, but hit every comedic moment with amazing skill.

I think the film basically says - what do we have the opportunity to embellish that a live performance physically can’t? Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, or just replicate the musical, it creates some unexpected moments of brilliance. For example, I think the film’s version of What Is This Feeling is one of the best movie musical sequences I’ve ever seen, and outstrips the musical. On the flip side, I think it tried too hard to give gravity (lol) to Defying Gravity, and ended up dragging it out too long. It was still great, but doesn’t compare to the musical’s impact.

When you combine the success of the actual film with the brilliance of the original musical and the absolutely delightfully batshit press tour, which gave us such beautiful snacks as the holding space meme and the Ariana Grande/ Ethan Slater showmance infidelity (this essay on The Cut just came out from Slater’s ex-wife…) we’re given more than just an enjoyable piece of art, we’re given a cultural MOMENT, which really rescued the last half of 2024.

Plus the only other films I can remember watching this year were Gladiator 2, which made me incredibly mad as a history nerd and is a huge stinker, Challengers, which I loved because I too am horny and bisexual but docked points from because it’s about “tennis”, and Madame Web which I watched on the plane home from the UK while doped up on a cocktail of drugs and briefly thought was the best film I’d ever seen. Congrats to Wicked.

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Patrick Lenton is an writer and author, and editor of Nonsense Newsletter. His new book ‘In Spite of You’ is coming out in 2025.