ariana-grande – Movie Meister Reviews

Released: 20th November
Seen: 3rd December

Last year, after an incredibly long development process, we finally got the film adaptation of the Broadway megahit Wicked and it was easily one of the best films of the year. It was a sensation, a top ten highest-grossing film for 2024, winner of two Oscars, nominated for a total of 10 which made it the second most-nominated film of the evening (tied with The Brutalist). It lived up to pretty much every expectation that people had for this adaptation and even surpassed a few of them. In the aftermath it turned Cynthia Erivo into a household name, reminded everyone that Ariana Grande is a genuinely fantastic actress outside of her pop career and is probably the final straw that got Jonathan Bailey the sexiest man alive title that he so richly deserved. It was, and will forever be considered, a masterpiece… and it was only presenting the first act of the musical.

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Released: 1st August
Seen: 24th November

On October 30th 2003, the Gershwin Theatre presented the opening night performance of a little musical about a woman with green skin battling adversity and learning her true power through friendship with a hyperactive floating Barbie… that show was Wicked and to this day that show has captured audiences around the world. As of writing this sentence, it’s the second highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time, the fourth longest-running show in Broadway history and has been toured around the world so many times that it would be impossible to calculate just how many people have seen the show. It is a genre-defining artwork, one that has been talked about being turned into a movie since approximately 47 seconds after a movie producer heard Idina Menzel sing Defying Gravity for the first time and knew that this show needed to be captured on film… it’s taken them 20 years, it’s not the cast that they expected to get and it’s split a 2-hour-long stage show into two movies of 2+ hours each, but it looks like they absolutely nailed it.

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