Wicked Poster Controversy: Star Cynthia Erivo Responds

Last week, Warner Bros.’s Wicked did what any movie adapting a well-known Broadway play would do and uploaded a new poster highlighting its main stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. The poster, which saw Grande’s Glinda whispering in the ear of Erivo’s Elphaba, now sees itself at the epicenter of online drama between fans that got so out of hand that Erivo had to air them out on her official social media account.

The new image of Grande and Erivo pays homage to the original play’s iconic illustration. Even if you have never seen Wicked on stage, chances are you’ve seen this poster out in the wild because it was virtually inescapable in the early aughts. However, a notable change in Warner Bros. Discovery’s otherwise one-to-one recreation of the original play’s poster is that Erivo’s face isn’t obscured by the shadow of her pointy witch hat. While this minute detail wouldn’t rock the world of any ordinary person looking at the two posters, the internet went pretty wild with this discrepancy. What followed was a tirade of fan edits claiming to have “fixed” Warner Bros.’s poster with the initial intention of making Erivo’s Elphaba as devilishly witchy as the Broadway poster’s iteration of the character.

Have you heard? #WickedMovie tickets on sale now! 💚🩷 https://t.co/ZusjT6MqoA pic.twitter.com/8CQgqGgL8n

— Wicked Movie (@wickedmovie) October 9, 2024

Key among these fan edit changes were casting a shadow across Erivo’s eyes and editing her lips to have a similar red lipstick as the Broadway poster. Somewhere down the line, fans got even weirder with their armchair graphics design sensibilities and “created” AI videos of the Wicked poster referencing an in-fandom meme where Glinda asks Elphaba about her private parts being green, too (I don’t go here; I just write the news). This all prompted Erivo to sound off on her official Instagram story and call out all the weirdo behavior from Wicked fans.

“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posting the question ‘is your ***** green.’ None of this is funny. None of this is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us,” Erivo wrote.

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.”

Erivo followed up her Instagram story by resharing the original Wicked movie poster of her and Grande with the caption, “Let me put this right here, to remind you and cleanse your palette.”

Cynthia Erivo reacts to edits of the ‘Wicked’ poster and the viral AI fighting animation:

“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.” pic.twitter.com/R7jGz0Nxnx

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) October 16, 2024

Now that all that drama has been explained and nipped in the bud, hopefully fans can more positively focus their unbridled excitement for the prequel Wizard of Oz musical. Wicked is actually part one of a film duology, with its second half scheduled to release in November 2025. While the length of the film was in contention at first, the official AMC Theaters page, Fandango, and Moviefone all confirm that Wicked has a two-hour and 40-minute runtime. For those keeping score, that’s as long as the Broadway play with an intermission. Hopefully, the film will justify doubling the length of its source material across two films.

Wicked releases in theaters November 22.

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