Wicked: For Good’s Ending Was Left Unscripted On Purpose
Director Jon M. Chu says he still doesn't know what Glinda whispers to Elphaba in the film's closing shot.
YOU NEED TO KNOW
- Wicked: For Good began streaming on Netflix July 20, 2026, after a March run on Peacock.
- Director Jon M. Chu hid the film’s final shot from Universal executives to protect it from marketing.
- Chu says Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo chose their own dialogue for the ending, and he still doesn’t know what was said.
- The scene recreates the original Wicked Broadway poster, where Glinda whispers to Elphaba.
Wicked: For Good arrived on Netflix today, July 20, 2026, following a four-month run on Peacock that began in March.
The streaming debut has renewed attention on one specific detail from the film’s ending, not because of anything hidden in the audio mix, but because of something director Jon M. Chu has said publicly, and repeatedly, that he genuinely doesn’t know.
The film closes on a shot recreating the most iconic image from the original Wicked Broadway musical: Glinda whispering something into Elphaba’s ear.
In the stage show, the moment never actually happens, the poster depicts a scene that doesn’t exist in the script. Chu built his film’s final shot around bringing that image to life, and then made a deliberate choice about how to handle it.
“It was always the plan. I was always going to end on the whisper,” Chu told Variety. He described going to unusual lengths to keep the shot hidden from Universal’s own marketing team, even after the studio had already released a poster referencing the same image for the first film.
Do you know how hard it was to force Universal to never use it in any marketing material? he said. “I imposed a huge thing: ‘Do not show this shot!’ They wanted it so badly.”
What makes the scene unusual isn’t a production detail buried in the sound mix. It’s that Chu handed creative control of the moment entirely to his two lead actresses.
The girls got to choose what they are actually saying in the scene, he told Business Insider.
“I don’t even know what they said.” He’s repeated this in multiple interviews since the film’s theatrical release, framing the ambiguity as intentional rather than incidental.
“That poster is one of the most brilliant posters ever made because you don’t know what Glinda’s saying,” he told Variety. “It’s sort of the key to friendship. That we have these secrets.”
Cynthia Erivo has spoken about the scene separately, telling Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast that shooting the film’s ending was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to shoot.”
She’s also addressed a related question fans have debated since the film’s release, whether Glinda actually knows Elphaba survived her staged death.
“I don’t think she knows at all,” Erivo said. “I would put my money on it that Glinda does not know that Elphaba is alive.”
The choice to let Grande and Erivo write their own final exchange fits a broader pattern in how Chu handled the ending.
He also revealed to Entertainment Weekly that a specific prop, a piece of fabric from Fiyero’s uniform delivered to Elphaba near the film’s end, contains a note explaining how Fiyero knew where to find her, a detail the camera deliberately never shows in close-up.
None of this is something a listener can extract with a pair of headphones or an equalizer adjustment. It’s a creative decision Chu made and has stood by consistently across separate interviews spanning the film’s theatrical release and its streaming debut. The mystery isn’t a technical oversight. It’s the point.
For audiences revisiting the ending now that it’s available on Netflix, the takeaway isn’t a hidden audio layer, it’s a rare instance of a director handing his actors full authorship over a film’s final, most iconic moment, and choosing not to find out what they did with it.
Read More: Doctor Doom Just Stopped Thor With One Hand
