Is Dorothy Going To Be In Wicked Part 2? It's... Kinda Complicated

Now that pretty much everyone is obsessed with Wicked, there’s only one thing to do in the year-long wait for Wicked Part Two: theorize about what the second half of the story will look like. Obviously, musical lovers already know how the story will end, but it’s pretty much a guarantee that this movie adaptation will be making notable changes from the stage production. Which leads to the most pressing question of all: will Dorothy be an actual character?

In the Wicked musical, Dorothy never actually appears on stage. The second act’s plot continually has its main characters arriving places just after Dorothy has left. But she has to be present for the iconic melting scene, right? Well, not really. In the musical, Dorothy melts Elphaba from behind a curtain, which only shows the two characters in silhouette. Usually an understudy will step behind the curtain to cast Dorothy’s shadow.

However, Dorothy does play a prominent role in Elphaba and Glinda’s story in Gregory Meguire’s Wicked novels. In those books, Dorothy is sent by the Wizard of Oz to destroy Elphaba, and the two have an extended interaction before Dorothy douses the witch with water.

Since the musical’s second act is only about an hour long, and fans are already guessing Wicked Part Two will be somewhere closer to the first movie’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime, it stands to reason that some details will be added that aren’t covered in the stage production. Could that include an expanded part for Dorothy?

Director Jon M. Chu teased that Dorothy will show up in some form in the next film, pointing out the quick cameo she had with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion at the start of Wicked.

“After we go somewhere over the rainbow, we see that those four iconic characters exist in this real world. And we will revisit those characters in movie two,” Chu said in a Nov. 23 interview with Variety.

But the director didn’t want to reveal too much about how prominent Dorothy will be in the upcoming movie.

“In the show, Dorothy is around. They have to intersect, and you can only tease it so much,” Chu said. “I won’t say whether she’s a character, necessarily, in movie two. There’s a part of me that wants everyone’s Dorothy to be the whatever Dorothy they want. And yet, there is interaction and some crossover. So I’ll leave that up to Part Two.”

Wicked Part Two is scheduled to hit theaters on Nov. 21, 2025.