Disney spent years trying to get Into the Woods to the screen. The 1987 Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine had defeated other studios and producers before Walt Disney Pictures announced its own adaptation in 2012, with Rob Marshall directing and John DeLuca producing. Marshall’s film arrived on December 25, 2014, after a New York City premiere on December 8. It runs 125 minutes. It is a musical fantasy comedy, and its tagline is a warning: “Be careful what you wish for…”
Trailer, via Walt Disney Studios Philippines.
A Baker, a Witch, and Four Impossible Items
The plot is a collision of fairy tales. A Baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) want a child. A Witch (Meryl Streep) has cursed them. The Witch once caught the Baker’s father robbing her garden while his wife was pregnant, and demanded their baby in return. He also stole her magic beans, so the Witch’s own mother punished her with age and ugliness.
The Witch offers a deal. She can lift the curse if the couple gathers four items for a potion: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure as gold. She cannot touch any of them herself.
That hunt pulls the couple into everyone else’s story. They meet Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), who is selling his cow, Milky-White. The Baker trades the Witch’s stolen beans, which Jack’s mother throws away; they grow into a beanstalk. They meet Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) and notice her red cape. They see Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy), the Witch’s adopted daughter and the Baker’s biological sister, let down her hair for her Prince. Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) flees her Prince in gold slippers.
The cast is deep: Johnny Depp as the Big Bad Wolf, Chris Pine as Cinderella’s Prince, Christine Baranski as the Stepmother, Tracey Ullman, Tammy Blanchard and Lucy Punch. The film is inspired by the Grimm Brothers’ fairy-tales of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Rapunzel.”
Where the Film Earns Its Keep
The performances carry it. The film’s reviews were generally positive, with praise for its acting performances, particularly Streep and Blunt, along with its visual style, production values and musical numbers. Blunt’s Baker’s Wife is the film’s engine; she wants the child and does the work. Streep plays the Witch without winking, which matters when the material could easily turn to pantomime. Marshall shot the whole thing in the United Kingdom, including at Shepperton Studios in London.
The criticism aimed at Into the Woods is consistent and correct: the tone in the final act. The musical’s second half turns dark, and the film does not fully commit. It wants the consequences without the weight. The Witch’s curse, the stolen beans, the baby demanded in return — the story is built on people paying for what they took. When the film softens that, it undercuts its own premise.
Here is what actually matters, ranked:
- Blunt and Streep, who give the film a spine.
- The production design and the Sondheim numbers.
- The final act, which is where the film stumbles.
It is still a commercial success. Its published critical score sits at 6.9/10, or 69/100 on Metacritic — a good-not-great number that matches the split in the reviews. The ensemble is too large for everyone to register; Depp’s Wolf is a cameo, and the Stepmother and stepsisters are furniture. The four-item quest structure keeps the middle moving, but it also flattens the characters into errand-runners.
Into the Woods is a good film that could have been a hard one. The casting is right, the songs are right, the look is right. What is missing is nerve in the last act, and that is the part that decides whether a fairy tale means anything.
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