What Happened After ‘Wicked: For Good’? This Raunchy Romance Movie Might Tell Us
Wicked: For Good (2025) finally gives Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) the ending fans had been hoping for. Rather than letting him die, Elphaba uses a spell to transform Fiyero into the Scarecrow, allowing him to survive a savage beating. By the end of the movie, the pair secretly leaves Oz together to start a new life.
It's a satisfying ending, but it also leaves one unusual question unanswered. What does life actually look like for them after that? Fiyero may still be the same person inside, but he's no longer human. The movie ends before audiences ever get to see what day-to-day life might be like for Elphaba and the man she saved. Oddly enough, the upcoming fantasy romance Wicker (2026) feels like it picks up that exact idea.
The film stars Olivia Colman as a lonely fisherwoman who asks a basket maker to build her a husband, after spending years being treated as an outcast by her village. So he creates a man (played by Alexander Skarsgård) who is entirely woven from wicker. From there, the story becomes an unconventional romance between two beings who exist outside society's expectations.
The similarities obviously aren't intentional. Wicker is based on Ursula Wills-Jones' 2016 short story The Wicker Husband, while Wicked adapts Gregory Maguire's beloved novel. Still, it's hard not to notice that both stories focus on women who have spent their lives being ostracized before finding love with men who, in one way or another, don't fit the definition of ordinary.
‘Wicker’ Explores the Fairy-Tale Ending ‘Wicked’ Skips Over
One of the biggest differences between the two stories is that Wicked: For Good ends before Elphaba and Fiyero's relationship is ever put to the test. But Wicker doesn't leave anything to the imagination. It explores what happens after the happy ending, including the challenges that come with building a life alongside someone the rest of the world doesn't understand.
For a while, the fisherwoman and her wicker husband are genuinely happy. He's kind, devoted, and becomes everything she had hoped for after years of believing nobody could ever love her. But their happiness bothers the villagers who spent years mocking her. And they become increasingly jealous that the woman they ridiculed has become the happiest person in the village.
That jealousy eventually turns into outright cruelty, which is an obstacle Elphaba and Fiyero never face on screen. However, it feels like the kind of conflict their relationship could easily have encountered had Wicked continued beyond its ending. That also says something interesting about Wicker since the idea of a woman marrying a man made from woven basket material sounds like a gimmick.
Although it's technically billed as a "romantic fantasy comedy," the story never treats the relationship as a joke. Behind the raunchy trailer, it asks some pretty serious questions like whether love can actually survive when the person you're with doesn't fit everyone else's idea of normal. While the wicker husband may look unusual, the problems the couple face are surprisingly human.
‘Wicker’ Has Already Sent the Internet Into Meltdown
The emotional side of Wicker may be what connects it to Wicked: For Good, but that's definitely not what people have been talking about since the trailer dropped. Instead, social media immediately became obsessed with a far more pressing issue. What exactly happens when your husband is made entirely from wicker?
The trailer wastes no time encouraging those questions. Skarsgård's wicker husband creaks whenever he moves, and romantic moments come with a good dose of physical comedy that's essentially built around the fact that nobody has any experience dating a walking basket. Still, it somehow manages to be sweet and completely ridiculous all at the same time.
That quickly turned into thousands of jokes online. "Hell yeah! Worth the splinters," one viewer wrote (via The Hollywood Reporter). Another admitted that they were "simultaneously confused and thirsty," while one comment perfectly summed up the movie's bizarre appeal by writing, "The bar is so low for men we're romanticizing baskets."
Others immediately started trying to solve the practical problems. "Can you imagine the splinters?" one person asked, only for someone else to confidently reply, "Wicker has a wax lining that makes it smooth, so I'm not worried." And just like that, the internet collectively accepted the premise and moved straight on to debating the engineering behind a wicker husband. Wicker hits theaters on October 23, 2026.
