“Wicked” has been a massive box office hit with $530 million in revenue and is on the rise at the global box office. It’s also a critical darling, garnering 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’ll try to get the timeline right if I can remember, but I think by the time I became president of production at Universal, the project was already there,” producer Marc Platt told the publication. “It was initially handpicked by Demi Moore.”
Platt was convinced that Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West would make a great movie. “People who showed interest in the first six months included Whoopi Goldberg and Claire Danes. Salma Hayek had some interest, and Laurie Metcalf,” Maguire recalled.
Although these names were floated, Maguire was interested in casting Moore in the role of Elphaba considering that she was one of the most popular actors at the time. Moore’s Animated Pictures production company optioned the book. Susan Todd was a producer there and told Vanity Fair that “Michelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson and Nicole Kidman” were put forward to play Glinda. She also revealed that Whoopi Goldberg was a contender for the rights to the novel.
“Whoopi Goldberg’s manager wanted to buy it for her. ‘But I really wanted to,'” Todd said. Goldberg’s publicist confirmed, “That’s right. Whoopi loved the book and tried hard to get the rights.
With Platt and Todd on board as producers, “Wicked” then moved into the screenwriting stage. The duo agreed that it was Linda Woolverton who provided a great first draft of “Wicked.” Woolverton was a beloved Disney alumnus who worked on scripts for classic films like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and “Mulan.”
“You wrote a beautiful script,” Todd said.
“It was, as I recall, a fairly faithful adaptation of a very big, dense, thick novel,” Platt added. The focus was on 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 was beginning to circle “Wicked” 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 was the one who really wanted to do a musical,” Todd said. “The idea came from her work at Disney, where she also worked on musicals for those animated films.”
Moore had a voice role in the Disney animated musical film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which featured songs co-written by Stephen Schwartz. He “immediately had this epiphany” that “Wicked” was “a great idea for a musical.”
“So, before I read the book, I was trying to get the rights — more or less, right away,” Schwartz said. “While I was trying to track them down, I found out about Demi’s production company and tried to get a meeting to talk to them no Do this movie and do a musical instead.
Schwartz noted at the time that Moore was not a singer, explaining, “Oddly enough, Demi was the speaking voice for Esmeralda in the Disney movie ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to do the singing myself,’ and we found someone similar to sing the character’s songs.” Point The mission is that I wasn’t saying, “Oh, let me do a Demi musical. I just wanted to see if I could be involved in the project.”
Unfortunately, Woolverton’s script never took off, and Schwartz eventually convinced the rights holders to let him try writing “Wicked” as a musical. The rest is history. Meanwhile, the screenwriter continued to write hit films like Disney’s live-action “Maleficent,” a sort of “Wicked” take on the villain “Sleeping Beauty” played by Angelina Jolie.
Visit Vanity Fair’s website to read more about the original attempt to bring “Wicked” to the big screen.
