Wicked adaptation in the works

Wicked was initially on track to be a movie before it detoured to Broadway in 2004, quickly becoming one of the most successful musicals of all time. Deadline says the project is finally returning to Hollywood as Universal works to reignite the magic of those ruby slippers once more.

It’s crowded on the Oz front–Disney attached Sam Raimi to The Great and Powerful Oz and Warner Bros has more than one film in development. But the $2 billion in global stage grosses for Wicked put it in league with Mamma Mia!, the long-running stage musical whose movie transfer grossed over $600 million worldwide for Universal. Wicked, a Wizard of Oz prequel, is based on the Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and focuses on the early relationship between Glinda the Good and Elphaba, a green-skinned beauty before she ended up flying on a broomstick…

JJ Abrams is said to be interested, and other directors whose names may be in the mix include James Mangold (a heart!), Ryan Murphy (a brain!), and Rob Marshall (the noive!). It would be a tidy time-capsule to have Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel reprise their Broadway roles as Glinda the Good and Elphaba the Green, but as much as I wish I’d seen them on stage I think they’d be utterly unconvincing as teenage rivals on film. Too preserved in amber. Someone has already mentioned Glee’s Lea Michele as Elphaba and that would be an exciting prospect. Any other casting wish-list ideas?