"If you go woke you go broke"- Newsmax host says Ariana Grande's "woke" interviews while promoting Wicked might kill the movie's success

The ongoing promotions of the recently released movie Wicked were discussed on NewsMax's Wake Up America on Tuesday, November 26. One of the news hosts started the conversation by talking about Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo being on a "big media tour," adding that instead of promoting the film, the co-stars were reportedly seen pushing its "woke" narrative.

A statement Grande gave to Glaad in an interview about her film recently was then mentioned. The singer had said to the outlet:

"Oz is a very queer place and has always been, even from the L. Frank Baum books. It's always been queer."

When a co-host of Wake Up America was asked for her opinion, she said:

"In these interviews, I think Ariana Grande is inserting herself and making things go woke, and as we know, if you go woke, you go broke. So, I don't think this strategy is going to work... I think this is a bad strategy for the movie!"

John M. Chu's Wicked, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, was released last Friday, November 22. As per Box Office Mojo, it has already made over $194 million in collections.

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Grande claimed her character in Wicked might be "a closeted homosexual"

In another segment of Tuesday's episode of Wake Up America, the news hosts discussed another statement made by Ariana Grande about her character in Wicked, where the singer-actress said Glinda "may be a closeted homosexual character who is actually in love with Elphaba." Grande also mentioned that even the chickens in Oz were gay.

Talking about Grande saying that Oz was a queer place in L. Frank Baum's book, a co-host said on the show:

"Growing up, I never thought of Oz as being gay and I mean, so Frank Baum, he was a children's author back in the early 1900s and I don't really think that anywhere in his writing he was talking about sexuality."

Another co-host pointed out that Grande was allegedly speaking to a very specific audience in the interviews where she made these statements.

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John M. Chu reinvented the look of Munchkins in Wicked

Besides the alleged "woke" statements shared by Ariana Grande, the representation of Munchkins made in Wicked is also getting a lot of attention on social media. While John M. Chu has stayed true to the book, the appearance of the Munchkins is a major transformation in the recent movie.

In both L. Frank Baum's book and the 1939 film, Munchkins were smaller in size than Dorothy. However, in the 2024 movie, the Munchkins are much taller. In an interview with the GQ magazine, Chu addressed the change, saying:

"We wanted [Boq] to come from a culture, and so we were trying to reinvent what a Munchkin is. In our eyes, Munchkin was not a size. We built the Munchkinland look around him, in a weird way—like this red-haired, fair-skinned type of character."

The director's attempt to reinvent the appearance of the Munchkins comes after decades of stories circulating about the short Munchkins from the 1939 movie.s. Some stories claim that they were an ill-behaved crowd, while others described their frequent drinking and indulgent behavior.

Sid Luft, the third husband of Judy Garland, also narrated stories about the Munchkins on the sets of the 1939 Wicked, in which his wife starred as Dorothy. In his 2017 autobiography titled Judy and I: My Life with Judy Garland, Luft mentioned how the actors who played Munchkins thought they could get away with anything because of their small size.

Luft elaborated:

"The Munchkins, of course, were close to her in size and couldn't resist teasing her, making her life a misery... They would make Judy’s life miserable on set by putting their hands under her dress. The men were 40 or more years old. They were disorderly as hell, yelling and screaming."

Sid and Judy got married in 1952 and had two children, a son named Joey and a daughter named Lorna, before getting divorced thirteen years later. Garland went on to marry five times before she died of a drug overdose at the age of 47.