Good news! It’s dead! The myth that audiences won’t stand for a true-blue big-screen musical is dead!

The movie version of the Broadway hit Wicked is busting box-office records left and right, recently dethroning Grease as the highest-grossing film adaptation of a Broadway show in history. Add in strongly positive reviews, rapidly escalating Oscar buzz, and a “Part Two” due in 2025, and you’ve got a blockbuster success story that’s also a ready-made franchise starter. After decades of stage-to-screen musicals of varying levels of success, Wicked is bringing Broadway into the IP-driven era of cinema, signaling the dawn of the MTU: The Musical Theater Universe.

That’s right; just like Kevin Feige shifted an industry by heeding the requests of superhero aficionados clamoring for comic-reverent screen versions of their childhood faves, producers Marc Platt and David Stone have transformed their Broadway blockbuster into a big-screen juggernaut by remaining, above all else, faithful to the show as it exists onstage. Musical theater superfans can now join the Marvel crowd in their transformation from nerdy cultural subset to cool kids at the center of the zeitgeist. Comic book movie-centric sites that usually focus on news about the latest Spider-Man or Avengers flick are now flooded with Wicked explainers. And seemingly niche knowledge about the plot details of Wicked’s second act are now as mainstream a talking point as “What happens after the Snap in Avengers: Infinity War?”

We may be a long way out from the kind of shared cinematic universe where Elphaba and Glinda team up with Alexander Hamilton or Evan Hansen. But the bones of what made the MCU initially flourish are undoubtedly at play here: a weaponizing of nerd culture’s desire to see nostalgic texts of their childhood visualized faithfully but realistically on the big screen, and the franchising of those texts to the point where the wait time between installments, where theories can percolate and anticipations build, becomes as integral as the content of the films themselves.

This gambit has paid off in wildly successful dividends, and that’s an undeniable victory for the Broadway crowd, the ones who tirelessly rail against the casting of non-singers in movie musicals and protest every movie musical trailer that seems hell-bent on obscuring any whiff of the characters bursting into song, from Sweeney Todd to Into the Woods to Mean Girls. The casting of whisper-singing Angourie Rice in that latter film seems particularly laughable when Wicked has Cynthia Erivo, surely one of our most gifted vocalists: Her effortless transition from onstage powerhouse to natural screen presence makes her a no-brainer for Elphaba on film.

The same goes for Ariana Grande, whose Glinda launches into “Popular” with the vim and........

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