Why the Wicked movie made those big changes to Defying Gravity

After years of gestation, Wicked – well, half of it anyway – has finally made it from the stages of Broadway and the West End to the big screen.

Cynthia Erivo has tested her admirable pipes to their limit by belting out the all-time classic track Defying Gravity – arguably one of the greatest musical theatre songs ever written – at the movie's conclusion.

But long-time fans of the show will have noticed that this version of Defying Gravity is a bit different to the one that has played out thousands of times on stage. Obviously, nobody expected the movie to adapt the stage show precisely — after all, it's much longer — but few expected such dramatic changes to a musical number that fans hold very dear.

Note: There are, naturally, spoilers ahead for Wicked.

In the movie, Defying Gravity serves as the final act. Instead of leading into a 20-minute interval as it does on stage, it has to bring the curtain down on an entire movie — with a year's wait for the next chapter. For this version of Wicked, the song does a different job, which made big changes necessary.

What did the Wicked movie change about Defying Gravity?

In an interview with Variety, director Jon M Chu described making Defying Gravity work on the big screen as "the nightmare of my life". He explained that he didn't feel it could play out exactly as it does on stage, given that it had to work as the satisfying narrative conclusion to a movie which runs for more than two and a half hours.

"[On stage] it goes so fast that it doesn’t feel like the end of the movie and it doesn’t feel earned," he said. "We can’t add more words to Defying Gravity. So, what if when she thinks she’s ready to fly, she’s not, and she falls? That changed things for us."

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Chu's decision was to break up the number into segments, rather than allowing it to play out as a continuous musical sequence.

The well-known lyrics unfold while being interspersed with dialogue moments between Erivo's Elphaba and Ariana Grande's Glinda, as well as action sequences involving the flying monkeys and cut-aways of various characters reacting to Elphaba's new notoriety as the "Wicked Witch of the West".

"Every turn was a trap that I knew our audience could despise us for," Chu told Entertainment Weekly. "If I'm not on a close-up on those specific words, at the moment that they want to see it, I'm screwed. If I break it up so much that they cannot recognise it, that's a problem."

Read more: Wicked’s Defying Gravity is a musical theatre anthem – and a battle cry for outsiders (The Conversation, 4 min read)

The conclusion to the number features a scene in which Elphaba attempts flight for the first time, only to plummet down the side of the Wizard's palace. That's until she sees a vision of her younger self and recalls the bullying and abuse she has faced throughout her life. This gives her the strength to finally harness and direct her power, achieving the euphoric flight that powers the final part of the song.

Chu confessed in that Variety interview that he was terrified about the decision to change such a famous song. "There was not one stone unturned, not one thing that we did not question, because we knew how important this was," he said.

Of the process, Chu added: "The whole time I was like: 'OK, we’ll test this and see how offended people are by this'. We definitely crunched it in to not spread it out so much. My own brain was like: 'I just want to make sure the fast version isn’t actually working now'.

"We did those versions too, and we’re like: 'No, we actually need all of this'. This is much bigger than just a song. This is about the ending of a movie and journey of a character that we’ve invested in it so much.”

Does the Wicked movie make Defying Gravity better?

Now, this is where the debate starts. Certainly, the changes are understandable. Defying Gravity has to serve a different structural purpose in the movie to the one it serves in the stage musical, even if it serves the same narrative purpose in the story.

Read more: Fans in hysterics over interviewer’s bizarre exchange over Wicked’s ‘Defying Gravity’ with Cynthia Erivo (The Independent, 4 min read)

The problem is that Chu's changes — while helping the movie from a story perspective — hobble the pure musical power wielded by Defying Gravity. The song's genius is in its slow build from a moral debate between Elphaba and Glinda to a full-throated assertion of the former's independence and power. By interrupting this trajectory to zoom around Oz and do cinematic spectacle, some of the elegance of the song's build is lost.

When Elphaba zooms into frame to deliver the killer verse beginning with "so if you care to find me... look to the western skies" — so memorably growled by Kerry Ellis during her West End tenure as Elphaba — it feels less like the authentic build-up of an impassioned monologue and more like an entirely separate chunk of storytelling.

It may be the case that Defying Gravity in its original form simply wouldn't have worked as the conclusion to a movie — that's certainly Chu's argument — but I can't help but feel that some of its unique power as a piece of music is squandered in this form. It might be the best thing for the story, but it's not the best thing for Defying Gravity as a stand-alone work of musical theatre at its best.

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Chu has also chosen to make those inevitable future sing-along screenings a nightmare for those of us who have spent decades listening to the original version and know every inflection by heart. Please, won't somebody think of the theatre kids?

Wicked is in UK cinemas now. Wicked: Part 2 is due to be released on 21 November 2025.