Two decades ago, the Wicked movie could’ve looked very different.
In a joint conversation with Vanity Fair, Marc Platt, who produced the 2024 film, Wicked author Gregory Maguire and composer Stephen Schwartz recalled the first efforts in the late 1990s to bring the Broadway musical to the big screen.
He detailed a world in which stars like Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman and more were interested in playing the beloved roles of Elphaba and Glinda, which eventually went to Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in this year’s adaptation of the musical.
“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,” Platt said. “It had been optioned initially by Demi Moore’s company.”
Platt knew that Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West would be a great film adaptation, and it became the focus of a bidding war among different actors who had a desire to produce the feature.
“People who had expressed an interest in the first six months included Whoopi Goldberg and Claire Danes,” Maguire said. “Salma Hayek had had some interest, and Laurie Metcalf.” Although Maguire wasn’t sure if they all intended to play the part of Elphaba.
Moore’s production company, Moving Pictures, especially pursued the rights to adapt it, and her popularity at the time — thanks to movies like A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Striptease — made her a strong candidate for the green-skinned witch.
“I used to say, I can imagine Demi Moore naked and green on the cover of Vanity Fair,” the author said.
While it never got to the point of casting Glinda, Michelle Pfeiffer, Emma Thompson and Nicole Kidman were all top of mind.
Suzanne Todd, an assistant to action-movie producer Joel Silver at the time, revealed that Goldberg was interested in buying the rights to the book. “Whoopi Goldberg’s manager wanted to buy it for her,” she said, but Maguire went with Moore.
Moore lent her voice to Disney’s animated musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which included songs co-written by Schwartz and he, “immediately had this epiphany” that Wicked needed to be a musical.
“So before I had even read the book, I was trying to get the rights — more or less, immediately,” the composer 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.”
He noted that if Moving Pictures was attached, Moore wouldn’t be singing. “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.”
Although a script never worked out, Schwartz convinced the rights holders to let him try writing Wicked as a stage musical, which he did. It debuted in 2003 and remains on Broadway today.
Part one of Wicked, which was released on Nov. 22, is the highest-grossing movie ever adapted from a Broadway show. Wicked: For Good hits theaters Nov. 21, 2025.
