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The “Wicked” movie is a box office powerhouse with $530 million and counting at the global box office. It’s also a critical darling, earning rave reviews and Oscar buzz for its leading ladies Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. But what if “Wicked” had originally been made decades ago with Demi Moore as the green-skinned Elphaba? A new report from Vanity Fair dives into the first attempts to bring “Wicked” to the big screen in the late 1990s.
“I am going to try and get the timeline right if I can remember, but I believe when I became the president of production at Universal, the project was already here,” producer Marc Platt told the publication. “It had been optioned initially by Demi Moore’s company.”
Platt was convinced that Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” would make for a great film adaptation. Maguire remembered that “people who had expressed an interest in the first six months included Whoopi Goldberg and Claire Danes. Salma Hayek had had some interest, and Laurie Metcalf.”
Popular on Variety Despite these names being thrown around, Maguire was interested in casting Moore as Elphaba considering she was one of the most popular actors of the time. Moore’s production company Moving Pictures had optioned the book. Suzanne Todd was a producer there and told Vanity Fair that “Michelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson and Nicole Kidman” were names thrown out to play Glinda. She also revealed that Whoopi Goldberg was a competitor in gaining rights to the novel.
“Whoopi Goldberg’s manager wanted to buy it for her. But I really wanted it,” Todd said, with Goldberg’s publicist confirming: “This is true. Whoopi loved the book and tried hard to get the rights.”
With Platt and Todd attached as producers, the “Wicked” movie next went into the screenwriting phase. The duo agreed that it was Linda Woolverton who delivered the first great draft for a “Wicked” movie. Woolverton was a beloved Disney alum who worked on the scripts for classics like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and “Mulan.”
“She wrote a beautiful script,” Todd said.
Platt added, “It was, as I recall, a fairly faithful adaptation of a very big, dense, thick novel. The focus was Elphaba as the warrior and The Wizard as this authoritarian leader, which is very much the DNA of Gregory’s book.”
According to Todd, Robert Zemeckis started circling the “Wicked” movie as a potential director at this time. It was also Woolverton who suggested taking a page from the playbook of the original “Wizard of Oz” movie and turning “Wicked” into a musical.
“Linda is the one who really wanted to do a musical,” Todd said. “The idea came from her work at Disney, where she had also worked on the musicals of those animated films.”
Moore had a voice role in the Disney animated musical “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which included songs co-written by Stephen Schwartz. He “immediately had this epiphany” that “Wicked” was “a great idea for a musical.”
“So before I had even read the book, I was trying to get the rights — more or less, immediately,” Schwartz said. “While I was trying to track them down, I learned about Demi’s production company and tried to get a meeting to talk them into not doing this movie, and doing a musical instead.”
Schwartz noted at the time that Moore was not a singer, explaining: “Oddly enough, Demi had been the speaking voice of Esmeralda in the Disney film ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to do my own singing,’ and we found a soundalike who sang the character’s songs. The point being — I wasn’t going in saying, ‘Oh, let me do a musical for Demi.’ I just wanted to see if I could home in on the project.”
Woolverton’s script never got off the ground, alas, and Schwartz eventually convinced the rights holders to let him take a stab at writing “Wicked” as a stage musical. The rest is history. The screenwriter, meanwhile, went on to write hits like Disney’s live-action “Maleficent,” a sort of “Wicked”-inspired take on the “Sleeping Beauty” villain as played by Angelina Jolie.
Visit Vanity Fair’s website to read more about the original attempt to bring “Wicked” to the big screen.
