In 2013, Sam Raimi—coming off Drag Me to Hell, his return to horror after his Spider-Man trilogy—took a trip over the rainbow for Oz the Great and Powerful. An unofficial prequel to 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, much like 1985’s Return to Oz is its unofficial sequel, Oz the Great and Powerful puts the focus on its title character. It imagines a backstory for the Emerald City’s mysterious ruler and also how he came to power after blundering his way there.
So, in other words, it’s not unlike Wicked and Wicked: For Good, bringing a new perspective to a familiar tale by exploring the life of someone not named Dorothy. The stickiest, most obvious problem with that comes with the casting of James Franco as con artist and carnival magician Oscar Diggs, who gets whisked to Oz when his hot air balloon tangles with a tornado.
Raimi couldn’t have known that Franco would run into off-screen trouble a few years after Oz‘s release. By the early 2010s, he’d co-starred in Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, notched an Oscar nomination for 127 Hours, and headlined the franchise reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes, among his many credits. But sexual misconduct allegations against the actor emerged; a lawsuit filed in 2019 was settled in 2021, according to Variety. He took a step away from Hollywood amid the controversy, and his career has never returned to the same heights.
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Showbiz is stuffed full of performers and creators who’ve fallen from grace, for reasons ranging from icky to actually criminal. And how you view the work of Woody Allen or Johnny Depp (or Jared Leto, J.K. Rowling, Ezra Miller, Armie Hammer, Roman Polanski… the list goes on) is a personal choice. Maybe you’re unbothered by their actions, somehow. Maybe you can temporarily separate the art from the artist. Or maybe your feelings are so strong they interfere with your enjoyment of whatever it is you’re watching.
Oz the Great and Powerful has an unfortunate meta-text attached to it, in that Oscar—Oz for short—is written as a complete sleaze who turns on his abundant charm to woo seemingly every girl he encounters. He has a whole routine that’s apparently irresistible; in fact, the reason he’s fleeing Kansas is because one of his conquests was also together with the circus strongman, who’s understandably ready to kick his ass over the situation.
Once he crash-lands in Oz—after a thrilling tornado sequence filled with jump-scare moments that remind you Raimi, the guy who made Evil Dead, is calling the shots—our wannabe Houdini meets Theodora (Mila Kunis). The doe-eyed witch assumes, based on visible evidence and her own naiveté, that Oscar is the great wizard the entire population has been waiting for, destined to take over the recently vacated throne of Oz.
Because Oscar has no moral compass—the point of Oz the Great and Powerful is so that he can develop one, though he needs a lot of help doing so—and is seemingly the only attractive man ever to walk the yellow brick road, he easily seduces Theodora.
We know he’s going to break her heart; there’s his past behavior to consider, and also those grimaces and eye rolls he makes when she starts talking about being together forever. She’s completely blindsided when he ditches her, and her heartbreak becomes horrifying when her more worldly sister (Rachel Weisz as Evanora) uses a sinister spell to turn Theodora into what we immediately recognize as the Wicked Witch of the West.
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Clearly this is not the origin story that makes Wicked such an uplifting and feminist reframing of L. Frank Baum’s standout villain. Things get worse when the newly green-skinned witch spies Oz meeting Glinda (Michelle Williams), the Good Witch of the South, a dazzlingly benevolent soul who eerily resembles the golden-haired farm girl who got under Oz’s skin back in Kansas.
Green is the color of jealousy, after all. But the movie’s choice to transform Theodora into a cackling vengeance-seeker is necessary to forward the plot; Evanora is able to retain her gorgeous facade until evil is defeated, at which time her inner hag also takes over. Oz the Great and Powerful lets them both live, of course, because the (good) people of Oz aren’t allowed to kill each other, and also because we need two witches when The Wizard of Oz picks up the plot a few years later.
However, even if you can put James Franco out of your mind and pretend a different blandly handsome face is playing Oscar instead, Oz the Great and Powerful has another sticking point that’s both important to the movie and also incredibly frustrating. As Wizard of Oz fans well know, the wizard doesn’t have any powers. He uses stagecraft and gadgets to fool people into thinking he does, at least until Toto literally pulls back the curtain on him in the 1939 movie’s climax.
And Oz the Great and Powerful has some nifty sequences showing off Oz’s sleight-of-hand skills, as well as his Thomas Edison-inspired inventions—which the Munchkins and other good guys help him build—that help him create illusions and defeat the witch sisters in the end. Ingenuity defeats magic! It’s thrilling until you think back on all the times Glinda uses actual magic to stop the other witches from doing something terrible with their magic, and you wonder why Oz (the world) is so invested in Oz (the man).
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Supposedly, they still need his charisma and ideas to guide them to victory, which makes a certain amount of sense. But why can’t the people just put their trust in Glinda, with all her fog banks and giant bubbles?
Of course, the movie is called Oz the Great and Powerful. So you need that character to be the focal point, even if the movie that’s actually called The Wizard of Oz isn’t really about him at all. But it still feels superfluous and a little disappointing to hammer in the idea that a land essentially caught in a power struggle between two women—three, once Theodora realizes her strength—is waiting around for a male wizard to arrive and take the throne.
That reductive (if necessary, for continuity) story point is almost as distracting as the James Franco factor. And it’s really too bad, because Oz the Great and Powerful is actually a pretty fun movie in nearly every other aspect. It’s clearly made with a lot of affection for The Wizard of Oz, with the added delight of spotting Raimi’s signature Easter eggs (yep, that’s Bruce Campbell as one of Evanora’s soldiers) sprinkled throughout.
While the 2013-era special effects are noticeably dated by now, they still lend themselves to Oz the Great and Powerful’s colorful whimsy, building out the world of Oz we know from the 1939 movie—but in a way that feels true to the material, not in a scary way like The Wizard of Oz’s funky makeover for the Sphere. Along with lush, if obviously green-screened, backdrops and production design, there’s a china doll come to life voiced by Joey King and a good-guy flying monkey (contrasting the wicked army of winged baboons) voiced by Zach Braff, CG characters who feel nearly as fleshed out as Glinda as they nudge Oz toward a less toxic existence.
As Wicked: For Good prepares to hit theaters, and that Las Vegas spectacle continues its AI reign of terror, The Wizard of Oz has planted its flag for a new generation of viewers. Oz the Great and Powerful exists, and it’s not an unpleasant way to spend two hours. But if the urge to branch out cinematically strikes, we suggest Return to Oz—a deeply unsettling and twisted take on that land over the rainbow, in all the best ways—as an expansion instead.
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You can stream both Oz the Great and Powerful and Return to Oz on Disney+.
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