A social media user has gone viral after predicting that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo would be Galinda/Glinda and Elphaba in Wicked years before the film had been cast.
The first installment of the two-part film series was released on November 22, with Wicked: Part Two scheduled to premiere in theaters on November 21, 2025. The feature films are adapted from the acclaimed Broadway musical Wicked, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz that explores the origins and friendship of two iconic witches: Elphaba, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, the Good Witch.
Cast alongside Grande and Erivo were Ethan Slater as the Munchkin Boq, Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard of Oz.
On February 8, 2019, X user (formerly Twitter) Isaiah Biggs predicted Grande and Erivo’s roles when he quote-tweeted an announcement that the Wicked movie was in development. “Cynthia Erivo for Elphaba. Ariana for Galinda. You’re welcome,” he wrote.
Newsweek reached out to Biggs for comment via X on Friday.
This post, which proved right despite being written years before the formal announcement on November 4, 2021, that both actors had been cast has resurfaced.
“My mind is so powerful,” Biggs wrote when he reshared the original post on Wednesday. At the time of writing, it had been viewed 3.9 million times.
The X account belonging to the entertainment news page Pop Base shared a screenshot of Biggs’s post from 2019 and said: “A resurfaced tweet from 2019 predicted Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s casting in ‘Wicked.’ It was tweeted on the day Ariana Grande released ‘thank u, next.'”
This has been viewed 9.8 million times.
Another X user reshared Pop Base’s post and added: “Woah. That is scary but they called it. They were great.”
Biggs also retweeted Pop Base’s post and wrote: “‘A resurfaced tweet from 2019’ uh hello I have a name!” This has been viewed 5.7 million times.
A Grande fan reposted Bigg’s original prediction, writing: “predicting this on tun [‘thank u next’] release day is INSANE.” The post has garnered 1.6 million views.
One of the reasons this forecast is so impressive is that both performers’ careers were different in 2019 from what they are now.
While Erivo was previously nominated for Best Actress and Best Original Song Oscars for her acting and songwriting in the film Harriet, this hadn’t happened at the time of the prediction. And even though she was well-established on Broadway, she wasn’t a break-out Hollywood star. While Grande was already a famous pop star and had acted in the Nickelodeon TV shows Victorious and Sam & Cat, she had never been the lead in a feature film.
According to Box Office Mojo, Wicked has joined the list of all-time-biggest box-office openings, ranking in the top 100. During the weekend of November 22 to 24, the film premiered with an estimated $114 million in domestic ticket sales, marking the highest opening weekend for a Broadway adaptation at the box office.
At the time of writing, Wicked had the 63rd highest-grossing opening weekend of all time in the U.S., beating the opening weekend box-office hauls of films such as Toy Story 3, Shrek 2 and Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith.
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