All the insanely dark content from the Wicked book the musical and film quickly left out

By now, you’ve probably watched the Wicked movie – and if I was a betting man I’d put money on the fact you’ll watch it plenty of times. Even if you’d never seen the musical that the Wicked movie is based on, I bet it managed to make a stan out of you. For those of us who loved the show, seeing the film in all its glory has been a revelation – especially because the fact it’s in two parts means the film got to flesh out more of the lore that the time constraints of the musical didn’t allow. And whilst the Wicked movie does pack in a lot more lore, it leaves out a lot of the much more dark content from the original book the musical and film are based on.

Wicked the musical was developed from the book Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. The show and the film took the plot in a slightly less dark direction than the source material, and you’ll be shocked at how dark things actually get.

The Wizard is even more evil in the book

The Wizard is despicable in the musical, but he is humanised a lot more than he is in the actual book. The Wizard in the OG book is still a con man and discriminating against the animals of Oz, but he is presented as more of an out and out tyrant. He also is revealed to be Elphaba’s father – and he drugged and raped her mother and that’s how Elphaba was conceived. Horrific.

Elphaba goes down a really dark path

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Elphaba and Fiyero reconnect after he marries Glinda in the books, and they have an affair for many years. This results in Elphaba becoming pregnant, and she names the child Liir. Things go horribly wrong when the Wizard kidnaps all of Fiyero’s family and then reveals that he’s had them all killed.

Elphaba goes mad and chases Dorothy Gale, and ends up bashing Madame Morrible’s head in violently. She also in her madness believes that the scarecrow is Fiyero reincarnated. It’s absolutely awful what she gets put through in the dark book – and there’s no happy ending like we get in the Wicked movie and show.

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