Wicked press continues on! On Tuesday, there was a special screening of the film at Metrograph in Manhattan, where the cast was joined by Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. Lively took her outfit inspo from the movie and opted to wear sparkly red heels.
If you are normal, you might look at this photo and say, “Cute!” or “Wow, they are really towering over Cynthia and Ariana.” If you are a real Wicked-head, you will immediately clock that Lively’s shoes are not canon.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the shoes given to Nessarose (who, spoiler alert for part two, ends up under a house) are actually silver. The same is true in Gregory McGuire’s book and the musical. There are no ruby-red slippers in Wicked or, for that matter, L. Frank Baum’s original books. The famous bright-red shoes exist only in The Wizard of Oz, because the film was shot using Technicolor and the red was really going to pop.
Now, the rights to the ruby slippers are owned by Warner Bros., which bought the rights to the film from MGM in the late ’90s. Universal is the studio behind Wicked, so the shoes remain silver. (There is a nod to the ruby slippers during “Popular,” though.) Are you keeping up?
This is all to say, I wish Lively had gone one level deeper and worn a silver shoe. Clearly, she did not spend the years of 2006 to 2009 learning everything she could about Wicked, its history, and its relationship to the 1939 film — probably because she was busy filming Gossip Girl.
On the other side of things, I like that Reynolds used his color palette to reference the Cowardly Lion.