Wicked: For Good (2025) — A CocoFlix Review of Oz's Grand Goodbye

Every two-part adaptation makes the same quiet promise: stay with us, and the ending will be worth the wait. Wicked: For Good arrived on November 21, 2025 — perfectly timed to own the Thanksgiving conversation — to collect on that promise and close out Jon M. Chu's enormous take on the Broadway phenomenon. After a year of anticipation, the answer fans got is honest, heartfelt, and more complicated than anyone hoped.

A Sequel That Was Never Going to Have It Easy

Let's be fair to this movie before we're hard on it. Anyone who knows the stage musical knows the open secret: the second act was always the trickier half. The first film got the origin story, the showstoppers, and an ending built to leave audiences levitating. This one inherits the consequences — Elphaba living as the so-called Wicked Witch of the West, Glinda installed as the Good Witch of the North, and a friendship being pulled apart by the machinery of Oz itself.

That's heavier material by design, and Chu leans into it rather than around it. At 2 hours and 17 minutes, For Good is a film about fallout: about what fame costs Glinda, what exile costs Elphaba, and whether either woman can still reach the other across everything Oz has decided about them. It's a genuinely dramatic film wearing a fantasy costume, and depending on what you wanted from this finale, that's either its greatest strength or its central problem.

The numbers tell the story of a divided crowd. Audience ratings have settled around 6.6 from nearly 68,000 votes — a respectable score, but a visible cooldown from the euphoria that greeted part one. Having watched it twice now, I think both camps have a point.

Erivo and Grande Are Still the Whole Engine

Whatever your complaints about this film, the two women at its center will not be among them. Cynthia Erivo remains one of the most ferocious vocalists ever put in front of a movie camera, and she sings Elphaba's second-act material with a rawness that makes some of the quieter scenes hit harder than the spectacle around them. When she lets loose, the film simply stops being arguable.

Ariana Grande, meanwhile, completes one of the more impressive evolutions in recent franchise history. Her Glinda was the comic firecracker of the first film; here she's asked to play the slow deflation of a woman who got everything she wanted and likes almost none of it. Grande's comic timing is still intact — thank goodness, because the film needs the levity — but it's her bittersweet register that surprises. And when the two finally share the title duet, the one number the entire stage show is famous for, the movie earns every tear it's chasing. No spoilers on context, but bring tissues. That song is the whole reason this project exists, and it delivers.

Jeff Goldblum's Wizard remains a perfectly off-kilter piece of casting — all charm and evasion, a man whose menace is that he never seems to think he's the villain.

Where the Green Paint Starts to Crack

Now the honest part. The decision to split the musical into two films gave part one room to breathe; it gives part two room to wander. There are stretches in the middle hour where you can feel the material being gently inflated to feature length — scenes that restate emotional beats we've already absorbed, subplots that exist mostly to keep the ensemble busy.

The tonal balance is also trickier this time. The first film could alternate between bubbly and ominous because its story was still ascending. For Good is descending by design, and Chu occasionally compensates with visual maximalism — more sets, more swirls, more everything — when what the story actually needs is stillness. The best moments here are the smallest ones, which makes the busiest ones feel like interruptions.

None of this sinks the film. But it explains the gap between the audience score and the first movie's reception: this is a finale you appreciate in pieces rather than surrender to whole.

A PG Fantasy with a Heavier Heart

A note for families, since the Family genre tag is doing some work here. The PG rating is accurate — there's nothing graphic — but this is emotionally darker territory than part one. Kids who handled the first film will be fine; just expect more conversations on the car ride home about loyalty, propaganda, and why crowds believe what they're told. Honestly, those are good conversations to have, and the film treats its young audience with respect rather than condescension. The Drama label on this one is fully earned.

Does It Stick the Landing?

Mostly, yes — on its own slightly wobbly terms. Wicked: For Good is a flawed finale to a phenomenon, but it's a finale with a real soul, anchored by two performances that will be remembered long after the pacing complaints fade. If you loved the first film, you owe yourself the ending; watching part one without this is like leaving a song before the final chorus.

My advice: make it a double feature. Both halves of the story are streaming on CocoFlix, and seeing them back to back smooths over many of this film's structural bumps — the wandering middle feels far less wandering when it's act two of one long night. If you don't have the app yet, the download from CocoFlix takes about a minute, which is less time than Glinda spends on a single hair flip.

It isn't the triumphant landing the first film promised. But it's a sincere one, and in an era of cynical franchise endings, sincerity counts for a lot.

CocoFlix verdict: 6.6/10