Let’s take the yellow brick road to the Wicked movie that might have been. While the movie musical starring Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey based on the 2003 Broadway hit is currently captivating movie audiences, there was almost a very different version made in the mid-1990s, which more closely followed the original source material, Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. According to Wicked film and Broadway producer Marc Platt, a movie adaptation was already floating around Universal Pictures when he joined the company in 1996. “I am going to try and get the timeline right if I can remember, but I believe when I became the president of production at Universal, the project was already here,” he told Vanity Fair in an interview published Dec. 19. “It had been optioned initially by Demi Moore’s company.” However, according to author Maguire, the book had been the focus of a bidding war among several actors who were interested in producing a film version, telling that outlet that Whoopi Goldberg “had expressed an interest in the first six months.” But when he heard that Moore wanted to make the movie, Maguire was quickly on board. Referencing her famed 1991 Annie Leibovitz photoshoot, Maguire quipped, “I used to say, I can imagine Demi Moore naked and green on the cover of Vanity Fair.” Moore’s company Moving Pictures secured the rights and Moore was interested in playing one of the lead roles, her producing partner Suzanne Todd confirmed. “I think on different days she could do either,” Todd explained of Moore’s ability to play either Elphaba or Glinda, “but in the moment it was definitely for Elphaba.” And while they never got the point of casting Glinda, Todd said they did have several actresses “top of mind,” including Nicole Kidman. She also confirmed that “there was kind of a rumble for a minute” that Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis was interested in joining the project, although she notes that she “never spoke” to him directly about it. Over the next few years, multiple screenwriters took stabs at a screenplay for a non-musical film adaptation from the book, with Platt and Maguire recalling that the strongest version came from Linda Woolverton, who wrote several Disney movies, including 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, 1994’s The Lion King and 1998’s Mulan. And it was apparently Woolverton who at one point suggested adding songs into the film. “Linda is the one who really wanted to do a musical,” Todd said. “The idea came from her work at Disney, where she had also worked on the musicals of those animated films.” Interesting, Broadway legend Stephen Schwartz-who ultimately wrote the music and lyrics for the stage version-saw the potential for a musical himself and brought the idea to Platt. And the rest, as they say, is history.