Let's start with "Universal paid 350$m for all the promotion and collaborations they did for this movie, helped in part by the fact that they're Universal. They own NBC and had Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande parade around in green and pink at the Olympics."
Which means they had a lot of faith in both parts of this movie - Part 2 is next year, hope you knew that. I know scraps of the lore of Wicked-slash-The Wizard of Oz. A key point is the musical adapts the book but not super closely in the second act.
So it's redressing the bones of an idea, that were already redressed in a play. They wan to entice the audience in a way that adapts the story without people feeling unsatisfied.
The biggest criticism is that the lighting doesn't work. I've read Chu's "reasoning" for it and I think it's BS. I think it's a throwback to how you could see and feel the warmth from movies being filmed on film with older movies that they tried to replicate with digital and it didn't work.
The rest is great.
