Key Insights

• Film Adaptation: A different version of Wicked was nearly made in the mid-1990s.
• Source Material: The planned film would have closely followed Gregory Maguire‘s novel.
• Production History: Producer Marc Platt noted that the project was already in development when he joined Universal Pictures.
• Bidding War: Several actors, including Whoopi Goldberg, were interested in producing a film adaptation.

Let’s take the Yellow Brick Road to the Wicked movie that might have been.

While Wicked: For Good—starring Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey and more—is finally out in theaters, there was almost a very different version made in the mid-1990s. As for that one? It would have more closely followed the original source material, a.k.a Gregory Maguire‘s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

In fact, Wicked film and Broadway producer Marc Platt said a movie adaptation was already floating around Universal Pictures when he joined the company in 1996.

“I am going to try and get the timeline right if I can remember, but I believe when I became the president of production at Universal, the project was already here,” he told Vanity Fair last year. “It had been optioned initially by Demi Moore‘s company.”

However, according to author Maguire, the book had been the focus of a bidding war among several actors who were interested in producing a film version, telling VF that Whoopi Goldberg “had expressed an interest in the first six months.“