Wicked is following Barbie's blueprint - why isn't it working?
A look into Wicked's attempt to capture the cultural conversation
Less than 18 months ago, everything - and I mean everything - was Barbie pink. In the social media age we’ve moved past monoculture, but for a fleeting moment we seemed to return to it. And now, the team behind the forthcoming Wicked movie has been working nights and weekends trying to get you to see this movie by employing the same campaign strategy as Barbie’s: themed outfits for the press tour, months of teasers and BTS photos, partnership tie-ins that paint every product possible in the movie’s signature pink and green.
The product integrations specifically echo Barbie’s campaign - during the summer of 2023 you couldn’t enter a single store without seeing a hot pink version of something you already own, and Wicked has tried to do the same. The folks over at The Hollywood Reporter have been tracking these partnerships - a whopping 64 brands have released Wicked themed collaborations which include everything from hair brushes to cupcake mix to squishmallows to cocktail kits. Wicked has even been trying to replicate the Barbie movie going experience by enforcing a ‘pink or green’ dress code for the influencer-studded premiers, likely to encourage audiences to dress up for their own screening experiences - just like Barbie’s audience did.
And yet Wicked hasn’t been able to achieve this same monoculture effect. There has been a loud lack of declarations that we’re entering Wicked Winter. The movie is highly anticipated and I’m sure it will still perform well in the box office, but the hype is just not hyping the same way Barbie’s did.
There are lots of reasons for this, many of them obvious. First, Wicked just doesn’t have the brand power that Barbie does. An estimated 65 million people have seen the musical across 16 countries but that’s just not comparable to the 58 million Barbies sold per year.
Perhaps more impactful is the timing - Wicked has been in the works since the dawn of time (actually since 2016 but god it feels longer) and yet no one had the foresight not to release it during a US election cycle. There’s no way they could’ve known it would’ve been the election cycle where fascism finally fully took the wheel; you can’t blame them for not knowing that. But unfortunately, the only monoculture there’s space for right now is dread and unrest.
Less obvious but possibly most important is that the Wicked team simply misunderstood what made Barbie such a massive cultural moment. Barbie’s yellow brick road to success was not paved with product partnerships but with memeability. The “this Barbie is a ____” template, the line “she’s everything and he’s just Ken”, the “hi Barbie!” greetings all spread like digital wildfire. It wasn’t just the products that were painted Barbie pink - it was the whole of pop culture. It’s hard to tell how much of that cultural moment was actually engineered by Mattel and how much was pure luck - was it causation or correlation that the release of Barbie and the peak of Girlhood™ happened at the same time?
Barbie sold us fantasy and escapism and offered us an easy way to project ourselves into it. Wicked, on the other hand, is just selling us Things. But the cost of living crisis has worsened in the past 18 months and people are more concerned with buying eggs than buying Things, plus these specific Things don’t have the monoculture backing to convince us to buy them the same way Barbie’s Things did. Pink was trending last summer but neither pink nor green - and certainly not the combination of the two - is trending now.
It wasn’t just the memes and the moment that projected Barbie into success - it was the magic. The fantasy that made Barbie the cinematic event of last year is missing from Wicked’s promotion, which is surprising and disappointing given the surplus of magic in the movie itself. A big part of that is the way Wicked looks. Every time a new clip is released the internet is up in arms with the same refrain: why does this look so flat? Why is it lit Like That? Wicked is so vibrant onstage, but based on the clips, the movie is the latest victim in Hollywood’s poor lighting epidemic. This visual flatness is especially unfortunate because the BTS photos of the sets look incredible.
I think it’s important that you know I’m not coming to this perspective as a hater - there are plenty of musical haters in the world but I am not one of them. Rather the opposite: I saw the national tour of Wicked as a kid and it legitimately changed my life. Wicked single handedly made me fall in love with musical theater and maybe even music in general. Dancing Through Life went triple platinum on my blue iPod nano! While other little girls dreamt of their future weddings I was dreaming of the Wicked movie, so it brings me no joy at all to say that it doesn’t seem like it will live up to those dreams. I will still be seeing it opening weekend of course, but I’m prepared for the post-movie debrief to be a negative one.
All this being said, I do believe Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero could fix me. Could fix all of us, even.
So many great points! Also Barbie's runtime was under 2 hours and Wicked's is a whopping 2 hours 40 minutes. Toooo loooooong