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 made magic at the box office — an account called @DiscussingFish on the social media platform X posted a joke about the film. "Jon M. Chu has confirmed he 'Forgot' to do the color grading for both 'WICKED' movies," the account, which is clearly mimicking accounts like @DiscussingFilm, wrote, attributing a quote to Chu that simply reads, "My fault."

Chu himself responded to the post elsewhere and called it "clickbait," but it also links to a Variety piece about how Chu forgot to call "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 even happened in the first place, though, is the colors in "Wicked: For Good" look, uh, bad.

Other people on X noticed this problem too. More specifically, fans took umbrage with pictures of practical sets supposedly used for both of Chu's "Wicked" films — 2024's "Wicked: Part One" being the other — based on the cinematic result we got. X user @thediegocrespo reposted shots of the brightly colored sets with the caption "Director and DP should be sued for malpractice," referencing both Chu and the movie's cinematographer Alice Brooks. When questioned, he continued with some solutions: "Proper lighting, lensing, [and] blocking of actors within a scene make a world of difference. Plenty of movies shot digitally (and with lots of VFX) look wonderful. It's just poorly implemented with 'Wicked.'"

I don't disagree with any of this, and I also think this is part of a larger problem. The "Wicked" movies, which are partially based on one of the most famously colorful movies in history, are not visual feasts, and even worse, they're not alone.

"The Wizard of Oz," made in 1939, is famous for its stunning use of Technicolor as it presents the famous ruby slippers, the Yellow Brick Road, and the Emerald City. Unfortunately, none of those cinematic treasures are given a respectful treatment in either of Jon M. Chu's "Wicked" movies. The Emerald City is a muddy shade of green, the Yellow Brick Road is muted (perhaps because of the way the movie links it to oppression), and those ruby slippers stick with the canonical silver presentation (though they do briefly turn red in "Wicked: For Good"). It's foolish to pretend, though, that this problem is in any way specific to the "Wicked" films; blockbusters just look like this now.

Both the big and small screen feature frankly insulting examples of sludgy, cruddy CGI effects that blur together and dampen colors to make everything look muffled and awful. Think of, I don't know, almost any superhero movie, and you'll realize what I mean; even as far back as 2019, an episode in the final season of "Game of Thrones" titled "The Long Night" didn't grade any of its colors, rendering it nearly pitch-black. Films like "The Wizard of Oz" and other colorful classics like "Singin' in the Rain" feel like bygone artifacts of past eras, because every time a new big-budget movie comes out, we're all treated to muted CGI and flat colors instead of the visual feasts you want from a big-screen epic. It's frustrating that, for a film that uses so much color in its marketing — pink for Glinda and green for Elphaba — it all looks so lifeless when you see it in action.

The worst part is that, even with all the bellyaching I've been doing about "Wicked: For Good" and how it looks, I genuinely enjoyed a lot of this movie. Ariana Grande-Butera and Cynthia Erivo are both excellent, the titular friendship ballad "For Good" made me a little misty, and I do now agree that it was a good idea to split "Wicked" into two movies. Still, there's something I want to harp on yet again about "Wicked: For Good" — it takes a Broadway act that doesn't take up more than one hour of time and more than doubles that run-time for absolutely no reason.

If we're going to complain about movies looking flat and muted these days, thanks to digital filmmaking and VFX, we should also be incensed that blockbusters refuse to keep their runtimes reasonable. I'm pretty sure a movie makes the same amount of money whether it's long or short, and I'm even more certain that "Wicked: For Good" would have been a lot better if it had seriously condensed everything, cut the frankly missable new songs written for Erivo and Grande-Butera (by the Broadway show's composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, no less), and tightened up the narrative. Is it bad that "Wicked: For Good" looks like that? Yeah. Is it worse that "Wicked: For Good" looks like that and makes you sit there for well over two hours as well? That's a definitive, resounding yes.

"Wicked: For Good" is in theaters now.