I call total and complete bulls*it on Wicked being split into two movies

One of the biggest movies of this upcoming holiday season is likely to be Wicked, a glossy movie version of the hugely successful Broadway musical. Wicked is based on the book of the same name by Gregory Maguire, which tells the story of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. The songs are bangers, the story is fun, and musical theaters nerds have been loving all over this show ever since its original run in 2003. The movie is going to be a big deal.

But there are caveats. We're actually getting two Wicked movies; the first, which comes out this November, is expected to end with the song "Defying Gravity," definitely the biggest breakout hit from the show, while the second will come along in 2025. “As we prepared the production over the last year, it became impossible to wrestle the story of ‘Wicked’ into a single film without doing some real damage to it,” director John M. Chu wrote in a statement back when this news first broke. “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. 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 journeys for these beloved characters.”

There's just one small problem with this explanation: it's a steaming pile of horseshit. Right now, the official Wicked website says the musical runs for two hours and 45 minutes with a 15-minute intermission, meaning that it actually runs two-and-a-half hours in total. That's not a short run-time, but it's nowhere near long enough to require breaking up the adaptation over multiple films. Avengers: Endgame is freaking three hours long, and it's the second highest-grossing movie in the history of cinema. Actually, looking at the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time, over half of them run for two-and-a-half hours or more! Titanic runs for three hours and 15 minutes and people loved it! So for Chu to claim that they couldn't possibly manage to fit the whole of the Wicked musical into that space strikes me as comically, ludicrously absurd.

Alternatively, composer Stephen Schwartz has claimed that the movie is being split in two to preserve the feeing of having a reset after the emotional high point of "Defying Gravity." As he told Variety: "We found it very difficult to get past 'Defying Gravity' without a break ... That song is written specifically to bring a curtain down, and whatever scene to follow it without a break just seemed hugely anti-climactic."

I also find this explanation to reek of horseshit. Yes, it's good to come down after a big moment like that, but it's one thing to wait through a 15-minute intermission to see what happens next and another to wait a year; I think everybody would say that they would suffer through a bit of an anti-climax following "Defying Gravity" rather than wait 12 months to see the story conclude. And y'know, if they really wanted to give people a break, they could just have an intermission in the movie. That kind of thing used to be common but got phased out in the '80s; the last major movie to have an intermission was Gandhi, released in 1982.

Schwartz has said there will be a new song in the movie version of Wicked, but no one made them do that, and even so, there's just no reason the entirety of Wicked can't be shown to movie audiences in one sitting. I think Universal has opted to split this story in two because it thinks it can make more money that way, plain and simple. And it's probably right, but it sucks. I've seen Wicked onstage and will probably see the movie, but I have hesitation that wouldn't be there if this was released as one film.

Oh, and can we talk about how the first movie is simply called Wicked and not Wicked: Part 1? That makes it seem like Universal is trying to lure in people who don't follow the trades and who will assume they're getting the full story only to find out at the end that they need to come back and buy a new ticket a year later. The whole thing feels skeezy.

ANYWAY, Wicked (Part 1) comes out on November 22, 2024, with Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West's real name) and Ariana Grande as Glinda, the future Good Witch of the North. Part 2 will be out on November 26, 2025.

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