Ariana Grande Talks Cynthia Erivo Blasting Fan-Edited Wicked Posters

Ariana Grande shared her perspective on fan-edited Wicked posters and AI-created content, both of which recently received some negative attention from her Wicked costar Cynthia Erivo.

“I think it’s very complicated because I find AI so conflicting and troublesome sometimes, but I think it’s just kind of such a massive adjustment period,” Grande told Variety on Saturday, October 19. “It’s so much bigger than us, and the fans are gonna have fun and make their edits.”

She added, “I have so much respect for my sister, Cynthia, and I love her so much. It’s just a big adjustment period. It’s so much stimulation about something that’s so much bigger than us.”

Last week, Erivo, 37, took to social media to slam a fan-edited Wicked poster which had been made to more closely resemble the poster for the original Broadway musical, with Elphaba’s witch hat adjusted to sit lower on Erivo’s head to cover her eyes. She also called out an AI-created animation wherein the movie poster morphed into a fight between Erivo and Grande, 31, as their respective characters, Elphaba and Glinda.

“This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘is your p— green?” Erivo wrote via Instagram Story on Wednesday, October 16, while sharing one of the photoshopped posters. “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”

Erivo went on to note that the “original poster is an ILLUSTRATION,” adding, “I am a real-life human being, who chose to look right at the camera to you, the viewer … because without words we communicate with our eyes.” She continued, “Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.”

Alongside Grande and Erivo, the Wicked cast also includes Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Bowen Yang, Peter Dinklage and more. Wicked will be released in two parts, with part one coming to theaters this November, while part two comes out one year later on November 25, 2025.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight earlier this year, Erivo praised the decision to split the story into two parts so they could better explore Elphaba and Glinda’s blossoming friendship.

“You can follow these women behind the scenes a little bit more, and you get to learn about the two of them,” Erivo said in February. “We’ve expanded on their relationship as friends. That’s a really important special thing that you have in the show, but here you really get to go with them in that. We’ve got something really special.”

Outside of musical theaters, Grande shared with Variety on Saturday that she would love to collaborate with Erivo on original music as well. “I love being in the studio with her, even just as like a fly on the wall, hearing what she’s working on and having her there when I’m working,” she told the outlet. “I think we are stuck with each other, professionally and personally for the rest of our lives.”