adminHollywood’s latest spectacle, Wicked: For Good, arrived on theater screens with the kind of blockbuster numbers that make executives smile and patriot hearts worry — it opened to a massive Thanksgiving weekend haul and topped box office charts, proving that powerhouse marketing still moves crowds even when the product comes laced with ideology.
Yet the press tour for the sequel has made clear this is not just about show tunes and spectacle; lead stars openly framed Oz as a “queer” safe space, a claim that has inflamed cultural debate and forced ordinary Americans to ask whether classic stories are being repurposed as political messaging.
Conservative commentators were right to push back: clips from premieres went viral, and influencers noted that Hollywood is increasingly comfortable reframing beloved family tales to serve a cultural agenda — a rewiring of childhood memory that is political by design, not by accident.
There’s also the matter of studio economics disguised as artistic necessity. Universal’s decision to split Wicked into two films drew suspicion from the start, and while some critics and analysts now admit the gamble paid off commercially, that doesn’t erase the patronizing business model that asks audiences to pay twice for what used to be a single experience.
Don’t let the celebratory headlines about record openings and glowing audience scores lull you into complacency; the film may have earned an A from moviegoers, but box office success shouldn’t be a free pass for Hollywood to lecture parents and rewrite cultural touchstones.
If you care about passing on a shared national culture to the next generation, it’s reasonable to be skeptical — and to demand better from studios that prefer virtue-signaling press tours to honest storytelling. Watch with your eyes open, judge the film on its merits, and call out the parts that feel less like entertainment and more like a political lesson wrapped in sequins.
Americans who still value common-sense narratives and the innocence of childhood stories should hold the line: enjoy art when it entertains, reject it when it indoctrinates, and remember that casting votes with our wallets and our voices is how we keep our culture from being quietly rewritten by coastal elites.
