\tThe \u201cWicked\u201d movie is a box office powerhouse with $530 million and counting at the global box office. It\u2019s also a critical darling, earning rave reviews and Oscar buzz for its leading ladies Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. But what if \u201cWicked\u201d 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 \u201cWicked\u201d to the big screen in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cI 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,\u201d producer Marc Platt told the publication. \u201cIt had been optioned initially by\u00a0Demi Moore\u2019s company.\u201d \t<\/p>\n
\tPlatt was convinced that Gregory Maguire\u2019s 1995 novel \u201cWicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West\u201d would make for a great film adaptation. Maguire remembered that \u201cpeople who had expressed an interest in the first six months included\u00a0Whoopi Goldberg\u00a0and\u00a0Claire Danes. Salma Hayek\u00a0had had some interest, and\u00a0Laurie Metcalf.\u201d <\/p>\n
\t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \tDespite 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\u2019s production company Moving Pictures had optioned the book. Suzanne Todd was a producer there and told Vanity Fair that \u201cMichelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson and Nicole Kidman\u201d were names thrown out to play Glinda. She also revealed that Whoopi Goldberg was a competitor in gaining rights to the novel.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWhoopi Goldberg\u2019s manager wanted to buy it for her. But I really wanted it,\u201d Todd said, with Goldberg\u2019s publicist confirming: \u201cThis is true. Whoopi loved the book and tried hard to get the rights.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tWith Platt and Todd attached as producers, the \u201cWicked\u201d movie next went into the screenwriting phase. The duo agreed that it was Linda Woolverton who delivered the first great draft for a \u201cWicked\u201d movie. Woolverton was a beloved Disney alum who worked on the scripts for classics like \u201cBeauty and the Beast,\u201d \u201cThe Lion King\u201d and \u201cMulan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\u201cShe wrote a beautiful script,\u201d Todd said.<\/p>\n
\tPlatt added, \u201cIt 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\u2019s book.\u201d \t<\/p>\n
\tAccording to Todd, Robert Zemeckis started circling the \u201cWicked\u201d movie as a potential director at this time. It was also Woolverton who suggested taking a page from the playbook of the original \u201cWizard of Oz\u201d movie and turning \u201cWicked\u201d into a musical.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cLinda is the one who really wanted to do a musical,\u201d Todd said. \u201cThe idea came from her work at Disney, where she had also worked on the musicals of those animated films.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tMoore had a voice role in the Disney animated musical \u201cThe Hunchback of Notre Dame,\u201d which included songs co-written by Stephen Schwartz. He \u201cimmediately had this epiphany\u201d that \u201cWicked\u201d was \u201ca great idea for a musical.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\u201cSo before I had even read the book, I was trying to get the rights \u2014 more or less, immediately,\u201d Schwartz said. \u201cWhile I was trying to track them down, I learned about Demi\u2019s production company and tried to get a meeting to talk them into\u00a0not\u00a0doing this movie, and doing a musical instead.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tSchwartz noted at the time that Moore was not a singer, explaining: \u201cOddly enough, Demi had been the speaking voice of Esmeralda in the Disney film\u00a0\u2018Hunchback of Notre Dame.\u2019 She said, \u2018I don\u2019t want to do my own singing,\u2019 and we found a soundalike who sang the character\u2019s songs. The point being \u2014 I wasn\u2019t going in saying, \u2018Oh, let me do a musical for Demi.\u2019 I just wanted to see if I could home in on the project.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tWoolverton\u2019s script never got off the ground, alas, and Schwartz eventually convinced the rights holders to let him take a stab at writing \u201cWicked\u201d as a stage musical. The rest is history. The screenwriter, meanwhile, went on to write hits like Disney\u2019s live-action\u00a0\u201cMaleficent,\u201d a sort of \u201cWicked\u201d-inspired take on the \u201cSleeping Beauty\u201d villain as played by\u00a0Angelina Jolie.<\/p>\n
\tVisit Vanity Fair\u2019s website to read more about the original attempt to bring \u201cWicked\u201d to the big screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cWicked\u201d movie is a box office powerhouse with $530 million and counting at the global box office. It\u2019s also a critical darling, earning rave reviews and Oscar buzz for its leading ladies Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. But what if \u201cWicked\u201d had originally been made decades ago with Demi Moore as the green-skinned Elphaba? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}