I am old enough to remember when Wicked opened on Broadway. I was still in high school and what felt like a million miles away from New York City. Still, even from the relatively provincial wilds of North Carolina, I was aware something big had landed on the Great White Way; an event so extraordinary to my generation that virtually overnight every theater kid was singing “Defying Gravity” and “Popular” in the halls of Green Hope High, whether their classmates wanted to hear it or not.
While there had been other hit musicals in my pint-sized life up to that point—the Rent phenomenon of the ‘90s was still going strong, and Mel Brooks got his late-in-life embrace of respectability only a few years prior thanks to chorus girls belting “Springtime to Hitler” to gray hairs—this was clearly different. In fact, there had been no bigger musicals since the ‘80s blockbusters imported from the UK’s West End almost 20 years prior. Those would have been your Cats and your Les Misérables. And of course The Phantom of the Opera. Indeed, the first musical I ever saw on the stage was one of that trio—how could it not have been for a ‘90s kid?—with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sweeping strings leaving me and other 12-year-olds balling by the time Christine Daaé picked stuffy old Raoul over the Phantom’s musical genius!
“I understand your pain, Phantom!” a tween version of myself lamented at the time (probably)—barely cognizant of the icky issues of consent and power which audiences in the ‘80s on through the 2000s glossed right over while making Phantom of the Opera a decades-long running smash. Even today, the show is still running on the West End while it only closed on Broadway last year, making it the longest running show ever in NYC. Well, at least until Wicked catches up.
Which brings me to the other intriguing parallels between Phantom and Wicked. In the moment of their debuts on the stage—1986 and ’88 for POTO, depending on the continent, and 2003 in Wicked’s heyday—they were the peak of pop culture synthesis; big splashy and brassy belters that articulated the values of the era with one high note after another. And yet, not by accident, both took nearly two decades or better to make it to the big screen (allowing enough time to soak in as many theater tickets as possible).
But when Phantom of the Opera arrived in cinemas 20 years ago this month, it was received with a whimper and treated like an afterthought largely ignored by audiences and awards voters at the time. Conversely, Wicked’s popularity has never been bigger than when it grossed $450 million (and counting) in its first few weeks and became one of the possible frontrunners for Best Picture this awards season. What are the differences between these films that might explain the change in perception and reception, and what might it say about the state of the movie musical?
Emphasis on Casting
Perhaps the most striking difference between what were supposed to be two landmark adaptations of Broadway favorites is how they approached their casting. On paper, it would seem that director Joel Schumacher—who captained Webber’s Phantom of the Opera to the screen after more than a decade of discussing the project—took more risks. When Schumacher was caught in Webber’s orbit, POTO was still the hottest ticket on Broadway where star Michael Crawford had just won a Tony to accompany his Olivier for playing the self-described Angel of Music. Webber’s own wife at the time, Sarah Brightman, also originated the role of Christine in both London and New York.
Yet it was the end of Brightman and Webber’s marriage that caused Schumacher’s first stab at Phantom to be waylaid until the 2000s, and by the time the project rolled back around, a choice was made to cast primarily unknown talent. Emmy Rossum was only 17 when cast in the role of Christine Daaé for the screen, with only one major film role on her resume up to that moment: as Sean Penn’s murdered daughter in Mystic River (2003). However, she was also filming The Day After Tomorrow while auditioning. Meanwhile Patrick Wilson was known on Broadway for playing Curly in a revival of Oklahoma! (the same production that made Hugh Jackman a star on the West End, in fact), as well as appearing in the original cast of The Full Monty. Neither though were a household name.
The biggest and most important piece of casting, however, was that of relatively obscure Scottish actor Gerard Butler in the title role of the Phantom. Keep in mind this was nearly half a decade from 300’s release, and the thing Butler was best known for at the time was playing a shirtless vampire in leather pants via Dracula 2000.
Intriguingly, director Jon M. Chu took almost a diametrically opposed tact when tackling Wicked 20 years later. When it came to his two leading ladies, the filmmaker, Universal Pictures, and Wicked maestro Stephen Schwartz either only pursued or settled on major names in the modern world of social media users who would already be attuned to Wicked’s theatrical and YA-adjacent roots. Think Cynthia Erivo, who won a Tony for tremendous work in The Color Purple, as Elphaba and Jonathan Bailey fresh off Netflix’s steamy Bridgerton as Fiyero. But most obviously this applies to Ariana Grande, one of the most popular pop stars in the world in 2024, as Glinda, the Good Witch whose attire in the movie musical veers straight into princess iconography.
At a glance, one might think Schumacher took greater chances than Chu. And yet, that’s true in more ways than one. While Phantom of the Opera did not feature a starry cast, it’s ironic to know Webber’s first choices for the roles of the Phantom and Christine were future stars of the Les Misérables movie, Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway. And when those didn’t happen, he still went for a casting that would mirror Tom Hooper’s later, highly divisive Les Mis film: he picked a movie actor who could not handle the musical material he was given.
While Rossum proved a decidedly vulnerable and delicate Christine, befitting Schumacher’s snowy (and youth-obsessed) aesthetic, with a voice like a clarion bell, and Wilson likewise is a terrific tenor, in the crucial part of the supposed Angel of Music, Webber and Schumacher chose Butler, a talent with a voice solid enough to front a rock band in his school days—which was Butler’s only singing experience before the film—but woefully short of a character who has been performed by literal opera singers. On the one hand, this seemed to curiously confirm Webber’s original vision of the Phantom never left.
Indeed, before Crawford turned the Phantom into a tortured, aged loner with a maniacal laugh in the ‘80s, Webber originally cast former 1970s glam rocker Steve Harley as the Phantom, a role which he kept until almost the eleventh hour when legendary stage director Harold Prince replaced Harley with someone a little more tragic (and full-throated).
Webber’s ideal of the Phantom—a misunderstood musical genius who can seduce any woman with the power of his talent—apparently remained that of a sexy rock god, and Butler was cast to deliver exactly that. In one sense, it reveals a unique interpretation of the character by his musical patron that’s antithetical to what Prince and Crawford turned into an icon on the stage. But it also was part and parcel of many movie musicals of the 2000s. The art form had only recently returned to popularity a few years prior to the POTO movie thanks to the success of Moulin Rouge! and Chicago, it also was recognized as a great place to cast starry talent like Catherine Zeta-Jones in her Oscar-winning role. After Chicago, the impulse time and again seemed to be to cast big names regardless of their musical talent in roles written for greater vocal ranges.
And to be sure, Butler is not the worst offender in this regard. There is, after all, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth in Mamma Mia! (2008) or infamously Russell Crowe in 2012’s Les Mis, to name but a few. Nevertheless, Butler’s rugged and untrained rock and roll voice literally tripped and faltered over high notes most stage Phantoms soared past. And for a character renowned for his musical gifts, it’s glaring.
Conversely, 20 years later audience expectations from singing talent has seemed to grow. Whether this is a reflection of social media heightening an appreciation for a good singer versus a bad one, or simply because traditional movie stardom matters less in the 2020s, I am not sure. But while getting Ariana Grande to play Glinda in Wicked undoubtedly had a lot to do with that movie’s initial attention-grabbing following on IG, Grande also has the musical versatility of a stage soprano. Meanwhile Erivo is one of the great Broadway talents of her generation.
Some of the supporting cast, such as Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum, might be cast purely for their marquee appeal, but the biggest roles have talent that can broadly match audience expectation for a stage Elphaba or Glinda—which seems par for the course in a time where Steven Spielberg cast Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose in West Side Story, and actual Broadway star Anthony Ramos took over the role of Usnavi in In the Heights.
A New Kind of Commercial Appeal
Lest this article turn into a piece too critical of the 2004 Phantom of the Opera movie, it is worth noting that time has in some ways been crueler to the movie musical adaptation. Twenty years ago, Schumacher’s goal was to translate everything that made the stage show popular to the screen. One might argue that this is in itself a trap since a moment that sings on stage could fall flat on the screen (remember those candelabras rising from the water of the Phantom’s underground lake?). Nevertheless, this is the M.O. of nearly every Broadway adaptation.
So while it’s open to debate whether Schumacher successfully transferred the power of Hal Prince’s theatrical designs to the cinematic medium, you still had all the basics there: the tragic love story between the Phantom and his muse, a story full of melodramatic murder, mayhem, and falling chandeliers, and of course every luscious piece of pseudo-operetta Webber penned for the show. All that, plus the bittersweet ending.
Meanwhile Wicked has come out in a very different context. Whereas two decades ago, a popular Broadway musical was just another type of story to interpret for the screen, one with a built-in and pre-existing audience who saw the show on stage, now it is something far more coveted: potentially valuable intellectual property. It is a brand in the same way Harry Potter is or Marvel; Coke and Pepsi. And the best way to exploit a brand is to expand on it and event-ize it as much as possible. Hence the opening title card of this November’s musical smash where it’s confirmed you’re actually watching just Wicked, Part 1. Aye, while being only four minutes shorter than the stage show, which includes an intermission, Wicked the Movie consists of only the first act, or roughly 60 percent of the musical.
There are all sorts of explanations and rationalizations given in the press, but at the end of the day this comes down to the fact that like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, and The Hobbit, there is a lot more money on the table when you split a story into two or more parts.
And to be fair, if you were ever to do that with a musical, it’s hard to think of a better one than Wicked. “Defying Gravity” is the greatest Act One showstopper this side of “One Day More” in Les Mis, and seeing how turgidly that aural epic was transferred as just a montage of close-ups in Hooper’s 2012 film gives credit to Chu’s choices to turn it into a monumental climax in Wicked where Elphaba struggles with literal flight before looming large over her insecurities and oppressors.
It’s a hell of a mic drop. So much so, that one wonders if in the long run it might harm Wicked, Part 2. After all, it’s an open secret among theater fans that most of the musical bangers in Schwartz’s songbook for the show are in Act One. There is nothing on the scale of “Defying Gravity,” “Popular,” or “Dancing Through Life” in the show’s second act, which might be why Schwartz and Chu have already confirmed new songs have been written for Part 2.
Whether they succeed or not, Wicked has turned into something more than a beloved film; it is now also a franchise. In the long term it remains to be seen whether that will help or hurt the movies’ joint legacy, but it certainly raises the popularity in the 2020s where audiences have been trained to thrill at the prospect of both a cliffhanger and a teaser for… another one.
Timing Is Everything
In the end, we must concede the different receptions between the Phantom of the Opera movie and the first half of Wicked’s Hollywood plunge comes down largely to timing. Other creative choices beyond casting played a role as well. For as much criticism as Wicked’s rather flat and washed out color palette has received, the film still has a certain grandeur befitting its story. The Phantom movie’s cinematography and hair and makeup choices, comparetively, always made the material seem more harlequin than it does on the stage.
But these aesthetics matter less to audiences than how a film generally makes them feel, and Wicked came out at a moment where its finale of self-empowerment in the face of rising authoritarianism is liberating. It’s wish-fulfillment. By contrast, the intentionally toxic relationship between the Phantom and Christine, a dynamic where the antihero grooms the heroine into thinking he might be the ghost of her dead father but also the specter of her ideal lover, had not fully aged out of the zeitgeist by 2004, but it was certainly a lot creakier-seeming than it appeared in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
The stage show came out during a period where sweeping Gothic aesthetics and overwrought emotions were in vogue. Anne Rice’s vampire novels were bestsellers, Meatloaf was a pop star, and movies that ran the gamut from Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Dracula to David Bowie in Labyrinth were the box office and/or VHS hits of their day. And all of those dealt at least at one point with a dangerous guy sweeping a gal (or Brad Pitt in the Interview with the Vampire movie) off her feet. But 18 years after Phantom debuted on the West End, tastes had changed, and the Gothic revival of the end of the century… ended.
Which is a long way to say Phantom of the Opera looked like a blast from the past when it arrived in cinemas circa 2004. Wicked, on the other hand, deals primarily with something as timeless as profound adolescent friendships between young women, and the sense of losing touch with your youthful self. Plus, its once seeming window-dressed themes about standing tall against fascism have grown frightfully relevant over the last nine years. Hell, just the last month.
The Wicked movie arrived at exactly the right moment whereas Phantom might have missed it years earlier when Schumacher’s first attempt to adapt it fell by the wayside. They can both have their fans, but it would seem Wicked’s popularity was built to always defy gravity.
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