I recently just watched Wicked on Amazon Prime and I have been blown away by the sheer cinematic set pieces and drama that unfolded before our very eyes. 

The story tells the tale of Elphaba, the soon-to-be witch of the west, and Glinda’s relationship growing up and how the two grew apart from one another based on the hit musical which is based on the book of the same name.

This wasn’t the first Oz prequel that fans got to feast their eyes upon. Back in 2013, Oz fans were greeted with the Sam Raimi directed Oz: The Great and Powerful. It starred James Franco and Mila Kunis and saw how the Wizard, Oscar Diggs, came to Oz and what led him to become the great Oz.

It’s fair to say that Wicked has truly exceeded that Oz prequel by leaps and bounds and here’s why.

Wicked has a better main character

The 2024 musical has proven to hold a better leading character as Elphaba begins as a green outcast who is the product of an affair that her mother had with another man. She proves to be incredibly powerful when arriving at Shiz University. She is treated poorly by her fellow students, including Glinda and is a social outcast, which launches her into a spiral of madness and wickedness. 

Oscar Diggs, on the other hand, began as a magician and con artist and escapes in a hot air balloon to the land of Oz, where he is lauded as the king to kill the Wicked Witch. 

The two characters are very différent. Elphaba is already a citizen of Oz and is hated and feared by its inhabitants and Diggs is a “tourist” and is being praised as the all-knowing Wizard of Oz to liberate its people. Elphaba starts off with a disadvantage which makes her a more palpable and enduring character than Diggs.

Wicked has better connections to the main characters

It’s inevitable that you are going to have some connections in an Oz-related story to the original characters that started it all. In Wicked, there is Boq Woodsman who is a composite character of Boq and the Tin Man, while Fiyero becomes the scarecrow later in the second film. It’s been revealed that there was a lion cub in Elphaba’s class that a vicious professor was attempting to experiment on, but, out of compassion, Elphaba steals the cub and frees him.

In Oz: The Great and Powerful, a lion attacks a flying monkey named Finley, but Diggs fends him off with one of his parlor tricks and the scarecrow and tin man are just vague references while Oz prepares for battle against the Witches, proving less than compelling when compared with the former.

It makes use of practical effects

One thing that I love about Wicked is the fact that it utilizes its practicals and doesn’t succumb to an overuse of CGI. Looking at Oz: The Great and Powerful looks like something that was artificially concocted in a Disney lab as the entire film was shot on sound stages and none of it was shot outside, which draws it out of the realism that is Oz.

A lot of this explains why Wicked is getting a sequel and Oz: The Great and Powerful only got one movie in.