A Very Specific Kind of Prequel Is Hollywood’s Newest Trend

The second “part” of the Wicked movie will arrive in theaters in November as Wicked: For Good, a title drawn from Elphaba and Glinda’s climactic duet from the Wicked Broadway musical. In it, the pair sing about how, because of their relationship, they have “been changed for good.”

It’s a play on words, of course. But it’s doubly fitting because the first Wicked (or Wicked: Part I, if you’re a stickler for onscreen title cards) is the biggest and most successful example of a kind of Hollywood blockbuster that’s exploded in popularity in the last year: A prequel that depicts the origin of an iconic movie bad guy in a story that uncovers their relatively “good” beginnings, before charting their largely unintended descent into villainy.

A few months before Wicked showed how The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West began her life as a mistreated outcast, longtime Transformers fans went to see Transformers One, which revealed that Optimus Prime and Megatron were not lifelong enemies. As young worker bots in the mines of Cybertron, they were actually best friends. And last month, Wicked was joined in multiplexes by Mufasa: The Lion King, another tale of two former allies who drift apart, with one becoming the ruler of the animal kingdom, and the other becoming its fearsome adversary.

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The parallels between these three major movies released in a stretch of just three months are striking. Their plot beats are largely interchangeable. Their central protagonists all start as best friends (or, in the case of Mufasa, adoptive brothers) before they are driven apart by the manipulations of power-hungry dictators (Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard in Wicked; Jon Hamm’s Sentinel Prime in Transformers One, Mads Mikkelsen’s Kiros in Mufasa).

Transformers One’s tagline — “Discover the Origin Behind the Rivalry” — could work equally well for Wicked or Mufasa. And main characters from all three movies shift between multiple names and identities. Galinda Upland becomes just Glinda; the bot known as D-16 rechristens himself “Megatron” after another powerful Transformer; the lion known as Taka later demands to be called Scar.

Prequels are not a new concept in Hollywood — The Godfather Part II just celebrated its 50th anniversary — but in the past they typically focused on the early days of heroes rather than villains. Both versions of the mid-2000s Exorcist prequels (Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Exorcist: The Beginning) followed the heroic title character decades prior to the events of the original film. 2013’s Monsters University depicted Monsters Inc.’s Mike and Sulley during their formative college years — and showed how they grew closer, not drifted apart like the protagonists of all of these recent, villain-forward prequels.

The same goes for the Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock of 2009’s Star Trek, which was technically a prequel, a reboot, and a legacyquel all rolled into one. Come to think of it, Transformers’ last prequel was Bumblebee, and it was about the mostly-mute (but unquestionably heroic) Autobot. Just a few months ago, Warner Bros. released Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a more traditional prequel (at least in terms of subject) about the popular warrior from Mad Max: Fury Road.

There are a few precedents for this other kind of villain-focused prequel. The most famous is surely the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, which depicted the fall of Jedi Anakin Skywalker, and his gradual transformation into Sith Lord Darth Vader. But the Star Wars prequels weren’t really about detailing the previously unrevealed goodness in a famous villain, or changing audiences’ preconceived notions about their motivations. Or if that was George Lucas’ intention, he didn’t really succeed. If anything, Anakin’s petulant actions in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith make Vader seem less complex than in something like Return of the Jedi.

The Star Wars prequels also weren’t about muddying up the image of the Jedi either. It showed them to be a bit naive — or flat-out gullible at times — but not overtly nefarious. These new prequels, in contrast, don’t just make their villains seem good, they also go out of their way to make their heroes look a little bit bad at the same time.

In Wicked, Galinda is Shiz University’s prototypical mean girl, until she begins to become friends with Elphaba. At Wicked’s climax, she chooses to stay and work with the Wizard — who she already knows is not the benevolent leader he claims to be — instead of leaving with Elphaba. And while Mufasa is a Disney movie with fairly clear-cut heroes and villains, it does include scenes where its title character shacks up with Sarabi, even though his brother Taka totally has the hots for her, a love triangle that mirrors the one in Wicked between Elphaba, Glinda, and the hunky Fiyero.

The question of why so many similar prequels all hit theaters so close together is open to debate. The popularity of the TV series Better Call Saul might have something to do with it. Recent current events in our world could also spur armchair psychologists’ interests in the origins of evil, I suppose.

It seems more likely, though, that Hollywood has so thoroughly wrung every last drop of juice from the legacyquel concept in the last ten years, that they recognize they need to find something (anything!) to replace it; a novel way to exploit their oh-so-valuable intellectual properties without simply trotting out their old stars for one last adventure with a new generation of characters. How many more legacyquels could there possibly be left to make at this point? (That said: New Line, if you would like to read my 185-page treatment for Austin Powers; The Grandpa Who Shagged Me, hit me up.)

These sorts of prequels also have the advantage of recasting recognizable characters with younger actors — ones who can potentially carry franchises for years or decades, and who don’t demand legacy star salaries. Speaking of Austin Powers, the upcoming Shrek sequel will cost DreamWorks a fortune in voice talent alone — surely many times more than Disney paid Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr. to play the young Mufasa and Taka.

Wicked proved to be a major hit in theaters; it’s currently the sixth-biggest film of 2024 worldwide, and the third biggest in the United States behind only Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine — and ahead of legacyquels like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Twisters, Gladiator II, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. But Mufasa started slowly at the box office (it has currently earned just $342 million worldwide), and Transformers One, despite some of the best reviews in the franchise’s history, was a borderline box-office bomb, earning just $130 million worldwide.

Wicked was big enough, with a sequel still on the way, that we could still see more franchises quickly follow suit. But only time will tell whether this new sort of villain-centric prequel is a Hollywood change for good.