If You’re Looking for Escapist Entertainment, You Might Not Find It in Wicked or Gladiator 2 (2024)

If predictions hold, it looks as if the attempt to engineer a second Barbenheimer by opening Wicked: PartI and GladiatorII on the same weekend will end up falling short of re-creating the same magic. (Both movies are projected to be hits, adding up to one of the year’s biggest weekends at the box office, just not at the same, gravity-defying level.) But even if “Glicked” doesn’t produce the same synergy, the movies have a lot to say to each other, so much that at times it can feel as if they’re telling the same story in adjacent theaters.

Gladiator II, the long-in-the-works sequel to Ridley Scott’s 2000 blockbuster and Best Picture winner, is the story of a crumbling empire brought low by the decadence of its rulers and its failure to live up to its own ideals. So is Wicked. Although the citizens of Oz have, as of the end of the story’s first half, yet to realize it, they’re living in a dystopia, a world being hollowed out beneath them as they tra-la-la the days away. This movie’s wizard, played by a wryly amoral Jeff Goldblum, is not an amiable plains-state fraud but a conniving schemer, deliberately stirring up his subjects’ unease about a nonexistent threat in order to consolidate his hold on power. “The best way to bring folks together,” he explains to Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, “is to give ’em a real good enemy.”

Gladiator II’s twin despots, emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), have plenty of real enemies, and they deserve them. Under their rule, what was once the land of Marcus Aurelius and Cicero is dominated by venality and corruption, its restive citizenry held in check by a combination of bloodlust and fear. When the Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) returns home after successfully conquering the African kingdom of Numidia—enslaving, among others, the movie’s protagonist, Lucius (Paul Mescal)—he finds the celebration of his victory cut short by the emperors’ desire to send him off on a fresh mission of conquest. The general suggests that Rome’s rulers might turn their attention to the task of feeding their newly acquired subjects before they extend their reach even farther. But Caracalla, a vampiric fop whose brain is being steadily devoured by syphilis, has a simpler solution: “Let them eat war.”

At first, Lucius is interested only in vengeance: He wants the head of the man responsible for the death of his wife. And that makes him vulnerable to the wealthy Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who purchases the captive warrior to fight in the arena on his behalf. Having built his fortune supplying arms to the emperors’ armies, Macrinus is a man with no ideals to betray; violence, he says, is the universal language, and politics merely a function of power. Lucius’ mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), is involved in a covert plot to overthrow the emperors and restore power to the Senate, returning to the “dream of Rome” imagined by her father, Marcus Aurelius. But as a former slave, Macrinus knows firsthand that even Rome’s loftiest idealists believed in freedom only for some. Macrinus sees the world as it is, not as it might be, a place to grab what you can get while you can get it. He cares about the empire only so long as he is alive to extract profit from it.

Back in Oz, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) uses a similar mixture of subterfuge and brute force to elevate her own fortunes. As the headmistress of Shiz University, she takes an awkward and uncertain Elphaba under her wing, seeing in the young witch’s undeveloped magical abilities a formidable weapon she can turn to her use. Marked as a social outsider by her green skin, Elphaba feels an instinctive affinity with Oz’s talking animals, who are being hounded out of the public sphere by the Wizard’s propaganda. (They are the “real good enemy” he has invented to keep the people of Oz in line.) But Morrible tempts Elphaba away from interspecies solidarity by telling her that she is one of a kind, special enough to merit a personal audience with the Wiz himself. She is immensely powerful, but she is alone—or would be, if she hadn’t, against all odds and expectations, formed a friendship with the prissy queen bee of Shiz U, Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera).

Both Lucius and Elphaba are descendants of royalty: He is the grandson of a previous emperor, and she, as revealed in Wicked’s second act, is the daughter of Oz himself. But only he sees his bloodline as destiny. Raised in another country with no inkling of his heritage, Lucius has always been a sworn enemy of Rome, but when he learns the history of his father, the late gladiator Maximus, he realizes that Romans, too, can be noble warriors. He gathers a small army to restore the glory of his grandfather’s era, and gives them a rousing speech about how, while the dream of Rome is dead, they can “dare to rebuild that dream together.” But as I watched that moment in a theater earlier this week, it felt as if not even his men were buying it, and the people around me certainly weren’t. (One or two clapped, which somehow sounded worse than none.) The world’s greatest power has succumbed to internal rot, allowing its self-interested leaders to enrich themselves while the people are distracted by grotesque spectacle, and the best you can come up with is “Let’s give it another shot”? No wonder Rome fell.

Wicked: Part I ends in medias res by design, with Elphaba coming into her full magical might. When the Wizard tells her that everyone deserves a chance to fly, it’s a tourist-board slogan, a promise to the masses that even though they don’t have power, they might someday. But she turns those words back on him, forcing Oz to be true to his word, and insisting on an everyone that includes her as well. Like Washington’s Macrinus, she’s come face-to-face with the ingrained prejudices of a society that stigmatizes and degrades the visibly different. (Wicked director Jon M. Chu engineers a masterful moment when Elphaba passes through a shaft of purple light that cancels out Erivo’s green makeup, and for a moment we see the real color of her skin.) The word that she is evil is already being spread throughout the kingdom, and we know how this story ends—with Dorothy the corn-fed dupe believing what she’s told. But for now, we’re allowed to savor the moment when Elphaba, free from being told who she is not, can finally be who she is.

After the 20-plus years it took both to come to the screen, Wicked: PartI and GladiatorII have arrived right on time, not just on the same day, but at a moment when stories of crumbling empires plundered by deceitful despots feel distinctly apropos. But while Elphaba looks to the western skies, Lucius can look only to the past—dreaming of the father he’ll never know, imagining a time when they can be reunited after death. There’s no future for him, or for Rome, just the comforting thoughts of a time when it was still great.