"The Wizard should be afraid...of me" says Cynthia Erivo in the second trailer for Wicked

The second official trailer for the upcoming film musical Wicked has just been released and the tone is strikingly different from the first of the movie's promotional spots. Any audiences coming to the musical for the first time have their first glimpse of what makes Oz call the protagonist the Wicked Witch of the West.

"I don't cause commotions; I am one."

The trailer opens on a well-known moment of triumph. As a black witch's hat rests on a puddle of water, Glinda the Good Witch (played in all her loveliness by Ariana Grande) announces, "Fellow Ozians, the Wicked Witch of the West is dead." The scene changes from the climax of The Wizard of Oz and we see a propaganda poster of a comically menacing, green-skinned witch looming over the Emerald City. The witch in question cowers as she is hunted down. She is burned in effigy. "Don't let her get away," an unidentified voice commands.

And then, says Glinda, "Let me tell you the whole story." Glinda and Elphaba meet at school. and Elphaba's frequent refrain of "Unlimited" begins, continuing into "Together, we're unlimited." We see Glinda showing her "unnaturally green" roommate kindness and affection, while Michelle Yeoh's Madame Morrible guides the witch's destructive powers and declares them to be "absolutely remarkable."

As the pair continue singing that "there's no fight we cannot win, just you and I, defying gravity," we see moments of explosive power and people reacting in fear to Elphaba's presence. She releases a cowardly lion cub into the wild and ill-fated love interest Fiyero teasingly accuses her of causing a commotion wherever she goes. "I don't cause commotions," the not yet wicked witch responds. "I am one."

And this is the message that fills out the rest of the trailer. We see private moments of goodness and love between friends, but as Elphaba takes her steps into the wider world, she becomes unstoppable. The Wizard sinisterly urges her to follow a certain road to lead directly to him and we see her conjuring a flight spell as the Wizard looks on in dread and amazement. Suddenly, his loyal monkey guards become her flying hordes of loyal servants and she sets them free.

As the troops of the Wizard close in, he says that "the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy." She is branded as "this wicked witch" as she crashes through a window and takes flight over the Emerald City.

"Don't be afraid," urges Glinda. Having chosen to take a stand against every thing she has aspired to because the Wizard is a tyrannical fraud, Elphaba utters the words that come just before her show-stopping "Defying Gravity" from the Act I finale: "It's the Wizard who should be afraid of me."

The whole story behind Elphaba's reign of terror comes to theaters on November 22, 2024.