Last week, Universal’s Wicked did what any film adapted from a famous Broadway play would do and released a new poster highlighting its two main stars, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. The poster, featuring Glinda Grande whispering in Elphaba’s Erivo ear, has now become the center of online drama among fans who have gone so out of control that Erivo had to address it on her official social media account.
The new image of Grande and Erivo pays tribute to the iconic illustration of the original play. Even if you haven’t seen Wicked on stage, you may have seen this poster somewhere in the wild as it was practically unavoidable in the early 2010s. However, the noticeable change in Warner Bros. Discovery’s recreation of the original play poster is that Erivo’s face is no longer obscured by her pointed wizard hat. While these subtle details may not faze the average observer glancing at the posters, the internet has become so fierce with this discrepancy. What followed were a series of fan edits claiming to have “fixed” the movie poster with the primary goal of making Erivo’s Elphaba look devilishly magical like the Broadway character poster.
Among the edits fans made, they darkened Erivo’s eyes and edited her lips to match the Broadway poster’s lip color. At one point, fans became even weirder by sensitively designing graphics on chairs and creating “AI-generated” videos for the series. The Wicked poster refers to a viral meme where Glinda asks Elphaba if her private parts are also green (I won’t go there; I’m just reporting the news). All of this eventually led Erivo to speak out on her official Instagram story and call out all the strange Wicked fan behaviors.
“This is the most vicious and vitriolic thing I’ve ever seen, equal to the horrid AI we fight against, equal to the people who spread the question ‘are your genitals green?’. None of this is funny. None of this is cute. It’s dehumanizing. Erivo wrote, “It dehumanizes us.”
She continued, “The original poster is an illustration. I am a real human, choosing to look directly down the barrel of the camera at you, the viewer… because we communicate without words with our eyes. Our poster is a tribute, not an imitation, to alter my face and hide my eyes means wipe me out. And that is excruciatingly painful.”
Erivo continued her story on Instagram by reposting the original Wicked movie poster featuring her and Grande with a caption saying, “Let me put this here for a reminder and a cleanse of your color palette.”
After all the drama has been explained and dealt with at its infancy, we hope fans can now focus more positively on the wild excitement of the prequel musical, Oz the Great and Powerful. Wicked is actually part one of a film duology, with the second half set to be released in November 2025. While the film’s runtime was a point of contention initially, AMC Theatres’ official page, as well as Fandango and Moviefone, have confirmed that Wicked has a runtime of 2 hours and 40 minutes. For those keeping score, that’s about the length of a Broadway show with one intermission. We hope the film justifies the doubling of source material length across two movies.
Wicked hits theaters on November 22.
Update: A previous version of this post inaccurately identified the studio behind Wicked. io9 regrets the error.
