The 2020s File Feature
Popular
Popular: Ariana Grande and the Wicked Soundtrack Moment That Landed The Most Anticipated Movie Musical in Years There are film events that feel like cultural…
01 The Story
Popular: Ariana Grande and the Wicked Soundtrack Moment That Landed
The Most Anticipated Movie Musical in Years
There are film events that feel like cultural appointments, moments when the buzz around a project reaches a pitch where the soundtrack becomes news before the movie even opens. The November 2024 release of the Wicked film adaptation, directed by Jon M. Chu, was that kind of occasion, carrying the weight of two decades of stage production reverence and the expectation of an audience that had been waiting a very long time. Ariana Grande, cast as Glinda, was one of the most scrutinized elements of the whole enterprise.
"Popular" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 53 on December 7, 2024, which was the song's peak position across its 9-week chart run. Grande performed the number as Glinda, bringing her own considerable vocal identity to a song that Broadway audiences had loved since the original cast recording in 2003.
From Stage to Screen: What Changed
The original "Popular" was written by Stephen Schwartz for the stage musical, a comic showstopper built around Glinda's cheerfully oblivious self-confidence. Kristin Chenoweth's performance of it became part of Broadway history. When Grande took on the role, she was both inheriting that legacy and, inevitably, bringing her own massive pop star gravity to it.
The film version retained Schwartz's original architecture but allowed room for the cinematic context to add new layers of comedy and character. Grande, whose vocal flexibility is one of her most celebrated qualities, threaded the theatrical requirements of the song with her instinctive pop charisma. The question that surrounded the casting from the announcement onward was whether she could subordinate her star power to the character; most critics agreed that she managed it.
The Chart Context of December 2024
The Wicked film arrived at the end of a year already crowded with major pop events, and the soundtrack competed for chart space with a December release calendar that offered considerable competition. Nine weeks on the Hot 100 represents the kind of sustained cultural presence that comes from genuine audience affection rather than algorithmic saturation: people were actively choosing to stream the song weeks after seeing the film.
For Grande personally, the timing was significant. She had spent much of 2024 managing public attention of an unusual intensity, both for her music and for her personal life. Taking on a theatrical character within a beloved existing property gave her work a different kind of shelter: the story was not about Ariana Grande; it was about Glinda, and audiences met her there.
220 Million Views and a Fan Base That Travels
Over 220 million YouTube views on the film-associated content reflect something straightforward: both the Wicked audience and the Ariana Grande audience are enormous, and they overlap considerably. When a song sits at that intersection, it moves. The video attached to "Popular" benefited from the film's visual grammar, the pink-saturated aesthetic of Glinda's world rendered in a scale that a stage production could never match.
It is worth noting that for many younger viewers encountering the Wicked story for the first time through the film, Grande's performance would be the definitive version of this character. That is a specific kind of cultural weight, and the chart performance suggests that a significant number of them took the song with them.
Where It Sits in Her Catalog
Ariana Grande's discography by late 2024 was already one of the most commercially successful of her generation, built on a sequence of albums that each expanded her sonic range. "Popular" stands apart from all of it: theatrical in the proper sense, comedic in a register she had rarely used before, built around character rather than autobiography. It is the outlier that proves the range, and the chart run confirms that audiences found it worth their attention.
Let the opening bars pull you into Glinda's world, and watch how completely Grande disappears into someone else's bubble of self-delight.
“Popular” — Ariana Grande's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What Popular Is Really About: Transformation, Superficiality, and Hidden Kindness
The Cheerful Villain of Good Intentions
Glinda's "Popular" is one of musical theater's great comic numbers precisely because its narrator is simultaneously charming, oblivious, and, underneath the glitter, genuinely trying to help. She offers Elphaba a makeover and a social education with complete confidence that popularity is a gift she can bestow and that the right accessories constitute a moral good. The humor comes from the gap between her certainty and the audience's growing awareness of how wrong she is about what matters.
Stephen Schwartz wrote the song to do several things at once: to establish Glinda's character as comedy, to introduce the tentative beginning of her friendship with Elphaba, and to plant early seeds of the question the whole show will ask: what is worth wanting, and who decides?
Social Capital as Currency
The lyric treats popularity not as an accident or a gift but as a skill set that can be taught and learned. Glinda positions herself as teacher and mentor, cataloging the rules of social success with the evangelical certainty of someone who has never questioned whether the rules are worth following. This is both funny and, on reflection, a little sad: she has invested her entire identity in a social order that is arbitrary and cruel, and she does not know it yet.
For the audience in 2003, when the show first opened, these themes had clear high-school resonance. Social hierarchies built on appearance, confidence, and the right friendships were exactly the terrain that a generation raised on teen comedies and reality television recognized instantly.
The Friendship Beginning Beneath the Makeover
What keeps "Popular" from being mere comedy is the way it shows Glinda doing something real, if clumsy: reaching out to someone she has previously ignored or mocked and trying, in the only way she currently knows, to connect. Her vocabulary for connection is shallow, but the impulse behind it is not. The song plants the emotional seed of a friendship that will grow into the show's real subject, and even if Glinda does not know she is planting it, the audience can feel it happening.
Ariana Grande's performance in the 2024 film leans into this undertow of genuine warmth beneath the comic surface. She plays the obliviousness fully without losing the hint of something more honest trying to push through.
Why It Resonates Beyond the Theater
The enduring appeal of "Popular" for audiences who are not habitual musical theater fans suggests that it is touching something more broadly felt than Broadway in-jokes. The fantasy of being taught confidence and social ease by a more assured peer; the comedy of someone who is utterly wrong about what confidence actually looks like; the underlying wish to belong: these are not experiences unique to the Emerald City.
For younger listeners especially, the song captures the specific anxiety of feeling outside a social code you cannot quite read, while also gently suggesting that the people who seem to have it all figured out are running on performance rather than substance. That is a comforting message, delivered in the most delightful possible packaging.
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