When "Wicked" and "Gladiator II" debuted late last month, there was a painful attempt to call their shared box office success "Glicked" — a reference to the portmanteau of "Barbenheimer" that described the joint cultural triumph of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" in 2023. The "Barbenheimer" phenomenon was a genuine old-fashioned Hollywood success story: Two unusual and vivid and original stories (based, yes, on real history and a fa mous doll) from directors working near the peak of their powers that managed to be culturally relevant and open for interpretive debate. Whereas "Wicked" and the "Gladiator" sequel are conventional examples of how Hollywood makes almost all its money nowadays — through safe-seeming bets on famous brands and franchises that can be packaged into just-OKenough cinematic entertainments.
The musical numbers in "Wicked" and Denzel Washington's Roman scenery-chewing lend energy that's absent in the Disney empire nowadays. But neither are anything like the mass-market creativity we used to call The Movies. I've been writing lately about how American politics seem to have moved into a new dispensation — more unsettled and extreme, but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic.
One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles's villainous Harry Lime in "The Third Man," is supposed to be cultural ferment: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci .
