First Hollywood takes 20 years to adapt Wicked to the screen, and now they can’t make enough: Universal will be splitting the upcoming Wicked movie, adapted from the hugely popular stage musical, into two films.
This info comes straight from director Jon M. Chu, who announced it on Twitter. “Here’s what happened: as we prepared this production over the last year, it became increasingly clear that it would be impossible to wrestle the story of Wicked into a single film without doing some real damage to it,” he wrote. “As we tried to cut songs or trim characters, those decisions began to feel like fatal compromises to the source material that has entertained us all for so many years.”
"So we decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas and make not just one Wicked movie but TWO!!!! With more space, we can tell the story of Wicked as it was meant to be told while bringing even more depth and surprise to the journey of these beloved characters."
I don’t know what was discussed behind the scenes, but this smells like bullsh*t to me. Look, I’ve seen Wicked on stage, and it’s not so long that it needs to be stretched out to two movies. I would respect this more if Universal just came out and leveled with us: “We can make more money if we make two movies rather than one, so we’re doing that.”
Wicked movie release date
Breaking movies up into multiple installments has become common practice over the years. Sometimes it works — Dune is probably a dense enough text to justify two movies — but most of the time it’s just padding; did the final Hunger Games book need to be broken up into two movies? Did Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? And then there’s The Hobbit, which Warner Bros. split into an ungainly trilogy that was way less than the sum of its parts. Part of me hoped that disaster would have scared studios off this kind of thing, but here we are.
The Wicked musical is based on the book of the same name by Gregory Maguire. It’s the story of The Wizard of Oz but told from the Wicked Witch of the West’s perspective. In the movie, the Wicked Witch of the West will be played by Cynthia Erivo and Glinda the Good Witch by Ariana Grande.
Wicked: Part 1, or whatever they end up calling it, will be out o November 27, 2024. Wicked 2: The Search For More Money will premiere on December 25, 2025.
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h/t The A.V. Club