Wizard of Oz Movies in Order

Why this order?

Start with The Wizard of Oz (1939), then Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025), which adapt the stage musical's two acts. That order exists for a structural reason: For Good's second half runs simultaneously with the 1939 film's events, retelling Dorothy's arrival from Elphaba's side of the curtain, and the whole trick collapses if you do not know the original beat for beat. That simultaneity is the best junction in the franchise and the reason this order is non-negotiable.

Now the part every other guide mumbles through: the Oz films do not share a canon, and legally cannot. Baum's fourteen Oz novels are public domain, but the 1939 film's specific inventions belong to Warner Bros. (the ruby slippers are the famous example; in the book they are silver), so Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and Universal's Wicked films draw on the books and the musical, not the MGM movie. Wicked is explicitly not canon to 1939; it rhymes with it, carefully, from across a rights wall. Treat Oz the Great and Powerful as a prequel to the story-shape (the Wizard's balloon arrival), Return to Oz (1985) as the darker semi-sequel with Dorothy back from Kansas, and The Wiz (1978) as a standalone retelling with its own lineage.

For completists, the chronological-ish pass runs: Oz the Great and Powerful, Wicked, then the 1939 film with Wicked: For Good beside it, then Return to Oz, with The Wiz whenever. On the page, Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904, which introduces Ozma) are the canon core, and Gregory Maguire's four Wicked Years novels are the darker adult track the musical was carved from. What is next: a possible Ozma film musical from the Wicked team, based on The Marvelous Land of Oz, which Universal is interested in but has not greenlit; Stephen Schwartz himself says he does not know that it will happen, so treat it as a rumor with good posture, not a date.