Wicked’s real spell: The marketing of friendship
As Wicked For Good hits cinemas, we examine how the movie campaign turned friendship itself into the film’s USP, where the characters’ on-screen bond was validated by the actresses’ off-screen one.
Somewhere, deep in the emerald-green boardrooms of Universal Pictures, a marketing wizard clicked their heels together and wished for virality. And thus began the Wicked publicity tour – a marathon of mutual adoration so sugary it could rot teeth through an iPhone screen. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande held hands, held space, held each other – and generally behaved like bridesmaids on fizzy pop.
Universal’s marketing chief, Michael Moses, admitted this was deliberate: he said the campaign was meant to be “just short of obnoxious”. You have to admire the honesty – and the chutzpah. It turned out to be 2024’s most effective publicity strategy. In an age when the internet’s attention span is roughly that of a fruit fly, the only way to be noticed is to become impossible to escape.
Female rivalries in Hollywood and on Broadway
The irony, of course, is delicious. When Wicked opened on stage in 2003, the original Broadway leads, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, famously couldn’t stand each other. Joel Grey, the original Wizard, has spoken of a blazing row in Chenoweth’s dressing room weeks before the Tonys. They were different personalities – Chenoweth the effervescent extrovert, Menzel more reserved – and their rivalry became Broadway lore. Their chill offstage gave their warmth onstage a believable edge.
Female rivalry has always been catnip for showbiz columnists – and, let’s be honest, readers too. Marilyn Monroe versus Elizabeth Taylor, Mariah Carey versus Whitney Houston, Madonna versus Lady Gaga. Nothing delighted tabloids more than women cast as rivals. And when combatants were actually cast together on screen, it was even better. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s mutual loathing lent an extra bite to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine’s on-set battles added notoriety to Terms of Endearment. Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall’s froideur became the only enduring storyline of Sex and the City.
The feud formula was simple: play nice on screen, fight like cats off camera, and watch the press feast. But that sort of thing doesn’t fly today – a ‘Grande versus Erivo’ narrative would have generated calls for boycotts, rather than juicy copy. What once shifted tabloids now sparks TikTok storms, and no studio can afford the headline: “Don’t buy a ticket to Wicked – Ariana bullied Cynthia”.
Friendship goals
So Universal swung hard in the other direction and replaced malice with mush. The product they ended up selling wasn’t a film about Glinda and Elphaba’s on-screen bond, it was Ariana and Cynthia as friendship goals. These actresses didn’t just like each other – they behaved as though separation might trigger organ failure. The campaign turned friendship itself into the film’s USP, where the characters’ on-screen bond was validated by the actresses’ off-screen one.
Compare that to the sisterhood movies of the past – Thelma & Louise, Beaches, Waiting to Exhale, Steel Magnolias – where the stars did the press junkets, smiled for the cameras, and went home. Whatever friendships developed off set were kept private. The audience was trusted to separate performance from reality and understand that movie magic was enough.
Now, that separation is gone – and studios seem to think audiences want actors to be, not just act.
The casting controversies of late prove as much - Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings gave us white actors playing Egyptians; Scarlett Johansson was chased out of Rub & Tug for not being transgender; Angelina Jolie’s mixed-race portrayal of Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart; Chinese actresses as Japanese geishas in Memoirs of a Geisha; Jake Gyllenhaal’s Prince of Persia; Eddie Redmayne’s regret over The Danish Girl.
Authenticity has become the only acceptable illusion – studios now want biography with their performance. Wicked learned this lesson and pre-empted outrage by casting Marissa Bode, who uses a wheelchair, as the wheelchair-bound Nessarose. A casting choice both inclusive and reputationally bulletproof.
Performance meets reality
The same applies to off-screen relationships. If romantic leads must plausibly look in love off camera, then platonic leads must plausibly be best friends off it. Moviegoers – or at least the Terminally Online ones – now demand continuity between performance and reality, so the publicity tour must become an extension of the film itself.
Not that this is new – Hollywood has always loved a blurred line between fact and fiction. Audiences were thrilled when on-screen lovers became off-screen ones: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in “To Have and Have Not” made it chic, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Cleopatra” made it nuclear, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in “Mr & Mrs Smith” made it tabloid scripture. Love sold films because love looked real.
A Wicked friendship
Wicked pulled the same trick with a twist. Instead of romance, it sold friendship. Cynthia and Ariana’s bond is the product as much as a press narrative. The implication is that what we see on screen – sisterhood, female friendship as salvation – is what we’re watching unfold off screen too. The boundary between authenticity and performance has dissolved entirely. Friendship, of course, is a safer sell – all of the feels, none of the fallout.
Wicked’s publicity strategy may have been “just short of obnoxious”, but those of us in PR will marvel at its genius. It managed to turn a two-and-a-half-hour musical into a two-year TED Talk on female bonding, and the studio transformed the old story of two divas sharing a stage into an act of emotional philanthropy.
And when “Wicked: For Good” opens, we’ll all tune in for the waterworks – willingly and masochistically. We’ll watch the tears, the trembling lips, the declarations of “I just love her so much”, and we’ll roll our eyes – even as we click ‘share’. Because, for all our cynicism, the spell still works.
After all, this is Hollywood – where love may be dead – but friendship is forever, or at least until opening weekend.
- Wicked For Good is showing in selected cinemas from Thursday 20 November and nationwide from Friday.
Oli Foster is senior media consultant at PLMR. He previously wrote these blogs for Influence:
The PR power of backlash: why the riot at the Rite of Spring wasn’t a disaster
The original influencer: Eva Perón wrote the rules of political PR
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