Wicked: For Good, or For Harm?
In November 2025, Wicked: For Good, the second installment of Universal Pictures’ film rendition of the musical 'Wicked' hit theaters, accompanied by a massive, highly anticipated global press tour. On any given day, images and videos of Wicked stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo saturated social media timelines and talkshows alike.
As fans crowded screenings and promotional content flooded feeds, the conversation around the film began to shift. What initially appeared sparkly and celebratory quickly took a darker undercurrent: the familiar spectacle of women shrinking themselves in exchange for admiration. The already-small framed stars of the film appeared to have lost a significant amount of weight compared to just a year earlier. Almost immediately, the discourse unravelled – was this aspirational, triggering, or somehow, both?
Some fans and outlets praised their bodies. Others criticized them, speculating about unhealthy behaviors or accusing them of perpetuating harmful standards. While body positive and neutral movements often ask us to avert our gaze, Wicked makes that nearly impossible. The creative direction of the film and its press tour demands attention to the body, not the actress, the human, or the art.
To be clear, the mere existence of small bodies is not the problem, and no one should be attacked for their size, their eating habits, or mental health – real or presumed. But when multiple stars in a globally consumed franchise undergo stark, rapid physical changes, people notice. Wicked makes these changes a visual centerpiece. Clinically underweight frames are aestheticized as fantasy, with hollow collarbones and exposed ribs emphasized through soft lighting, rhinestones, and costume choices. The effect is that thinness, rather than storytelling, becomes the film’s visual and emotional center.
That shift matters. A story rooted in friendship, integrity, and moral courage becomes overshadowed by fixation on the bodies delivering the message.
Wicked is marketed most heavily to young women and girls, an audience uniquely vulnerable to internalizing the idea that thinness is a prerequisite for admiration, magic, or moral goodness. This lands at a particularly dangerous moment. Numerous recent studies and reports indicate that eating disorders (EDs) are on the rise, diagnoses are occurring at younger ages, and girls are becoming weight-aware earlier than ever. A 2010 study by Hawkings et al shows that exposure to thin-ideal imagery – especially images of visibly depleted or underweight bodies – can increase body dissatisfaction, heighten negative mood, worsen ED symptoms, lower self-esteem, and trigger relapse in people recovering from EDs. This risk is particularly acute for girls aged 9–14, who internalize body ideals long before they develop the critical tools to question them.
So when people feel unsettled or triggered by the imagery from this film flooding their feeds, it’s a predictable, documented psychological response to harmful visual cues. We should be talking about EDs, just not by blaming the individuals who are suffering.
Meanwhile, the glam pipeline repackages this harm as aspiration. Beauty breakdowns and major brands churning out Wicked themed products transform rapidly shrinking bodies into something “magical,” an aesthetic to emulate, a trend to buy into. That is not empowerment; it’s capitalism and patriarchy working in tandem, shrinking women physically and politically, then selling the result back to us as fantasy.
To say any one person is promoting an ED misses the point entirely. In conversations about harmful beauty standards, those who are visibly struggling often become the villains, as if their hyper-surveilled, publicly dissected bodies aren’t already carrying enormous pain. EDs affect physical, psychological, and social function, and have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric condition. An ED is a serious health condition, not aesthetic, no matter how public-facing the individual is.
The ED mind is tragically contradictory and the visuals around Wicked’s release, along with the media’s response, demonstrated just that. Ariana Grande, who has long spoken about her dream of playing Wicked’s Glinda, the Good Witch, ultimately landed the role and earnestly vowed to “take such good care of [Glinda]”, in a viral, touching clip of her accepting the role. What followed raised concern for some viewers, her stark weight loss appearing consistent with patterns often associated with relapse in those who have previously struggled with EDs. But that was not necessarily a broken promise, it was likely a devastating illustration of what living with an eating disorder actually means.
The illness convinces you that the behaviors harming you are the ones that will help you succeed, make you worthy, and let you finally be ‘good enough’ for something you've dreamed of your whole life. This is what makes eating disorders so insidious. They tell you that hurting yourself is taking care – of your art, your craft, your dreams. And when a production profits from that suffering, frames it as aspiration, and markets it as magic, it's not supporting the artist nor fulfillment of a dream, it's exploiting mental illness.
The production chose to highlight thinness, build style around it, and profit from it. It exploits performers, glam teams, and writers by reducing the artistry of their work to a spectacle of shrinking bodies. Every view tells studios that this is what sells and that it should continue.
Calling this out isn’t body-shaming, it’s refusing to let an industry glamorize a body standard that exists as a symptom of a devastating illness. It’s refusing to let a story about courage be overshadowed by being small.
This is not a critique of the talented artists involved. The costume designers, glam teams, writers, and performers deserve recognition for their craft. The issue is how the production chooses to package, frame, and market that work: through the glamorization of extreme thinness. In doing so, the film diminishes every artist involved, including the very performers whose bodies are being scrutinized.
We deserve art that celebrates women’s presence, not their erasure; art that refuses to frame disappearance as devotion, magic, or beauty.