As “Wicked: For Good” continues to soar at the box office, one of the quieter winners of the franchise likely isn’t NBCUniversal’s Peacock, but rather HBO Max, thanks to a library title that first hit theaters 85 years ago.
That’s based on Parrot Analytics’ Streaming Economics model, which quantified the impact of the spillover effect that the modern franchise has on the original “The Wizard of Oz.”
After “Wicked” premiered theatrically in November 2024, “The Wizard of Oz” generated an additional $2 million in global streaming revenue for HBO Max across the past four quarters. That lift is tied to increased subscriber acquisition and retention for the platform. Essentially, this is free value for HBO Max as audiences flocked back to Oz while “Wicked” dominated the cultural conversation.
The chart below shows that “The Wizard of Oz” typically contributes around $1 million per quarter for Max/HBO Max globally – a solid result for such an old movie. After “Wicked” arrived, the title’s contribution to the platform jumped sharply before easing back toward its long-run trend. For a streamer, that’s the best kind of upside: more value from an existing catalog asset, without new production or marketing costs. Because this estimate isolates the uplift relative to the movie’s historical baseline, these gains are an incremental impact that likely would not have happened without the new attention around “Wicked.”
As a point of comparison, our model calculates that in the two quarters since “Wicked” debuted on Peacock, it generated an estimated $7.7 million in direct streaming revenue for the platform, acquiring over 35,000 new subscribers. This streaming revenue is in addition to the movie’s massive $750M box office haul.
This underscores a reality of the modern entertainment flywheel. The marketing around a new release can enrich older titles wherever they happen to live. Universal’s “Wicked” may be the engine powering the moment, but the attention halo didn’t stay neatly inside one corporate ecosystem. When audiences want context, comfort viewing, or a sense of canon, they will go to whichever platform carries the right legacy title.
There’s a longer-term IP lesson here too, rooted in the public-domain quirks of Oz. The original L. Frank Baum books are now in the public domain in the U.S., making them fair game for creators to adapt the underlying stories and characters from those texts. But the 1939 film’s specific creative choices remain protected until 2035. Dorothy’s ruby slippers, for example, were a Hollywood invention (they were silver shoes in the books), which means that particular look-and-feel is still part of the film’s protected expression.
That distinction is yet another reason why studios keep returning to familiar worlds. Each adaptation can add fresh layers of protectable expression. “Wicked” doesn’t extend the 1939 movie’s copyright clock, but it can introduce new designs, character interpretations, and (most obviously) new songs that are copyrighted in their own right to create new commercial guardrails even as the older literary foundation remains free for anyone to use.
For HBO Max, the immediate takeaway is simple: A decades-old library title can still behave like a growth asset when the culture gives audiences a reason to rewatch. With “Wicked: For Good” reigniting Oz fever again, the platform’s $2 million “free ride” may not be the last trip down the Yellow Brick Road.
