Wicked is one of the most popular musicals in recent memory and so, of course, the coming film adaptation is one of the most anticipated titles on the 2024 movie schedule. The hype was turned up to 11 recently when a new Wicked movie poster, which paid homage to the famous stage musical poster, was released, but some of the reactions to the poster has star Cynthia Erivo quite upset.
The poster in question famously shows Glinda, played in the Wicked cast by Ariana Grande, whispering something in the ear of Elphaba, portrayed by Erivo. Some fans have taken to editing the live-action poster to make it even more like the original version, but the actress took to Instagram to make it clear she doesn’t find the decision to change her face the least bit funny. She said…
This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful Ai of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘if your ***** green.’ None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.
The main difference between the two posters is that in the original one, Elphaba is smirking and has her iconic black hat pulled down over her eyes. In the movie poster, Cynthia Erivo is looking out at the viewer with a more stoic look. While some fans may have felt they were creating a more “accurate” poster, Erivo points out that modifying her face to make her less visible isn’t a great look.
The other major difference is that the the poster for the stage musical didn’t include real people, it was a drawing, not a photograph of the original Elphaba Idina Menzel. The idea of the new movie poster was to pay homage to the musical, not to copy it. If they’d wanted to copy it exactly, they certainly could have done so but removing the actress's eyes means removing part of the point behind this one. She continued…
The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer… because, without words we communicate with our eyes. Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.
Cynthia Erivo followed up her post venting her frustration with one of the official Wicked movie posters for all to see what the new image was designed to convey.
Considering that Wicked the movie is being split in half, and even the first movie is going to be about as long as the entire stage play, we can expect that a poster won’t be the only place that Wicked isn’t going to be a carbon copy of its source material.
