When it was announced that Wicked was finally being made into a movie, fans of the Broadway show were thrilled to finally get to see the story of the Wicked Witch of the West play out on the big screen after being confined to the stage for more than a decade. However, the two-part epic may have never come about if director Jon M. Chu had not been brave enough to go ahead and split the original script into two movies. At the BFI London Film Festival, Chu said of the original script:
“When I came in, what I read was like a 200-something page script that was cobbled together, and it felt like a mishmash. It didn’t feel like a real movie.”
The idea of Wicked being a two-part movie was one that had always been floating around, but until the wheels actually got in motion to get any version of the story into theaters, it was a moot point. When the discussions finally turned to ending the story of the first movie after the earth-shaking anthem that is “Defying Gravity,” Chu was still not entirely certain it would work.
“I thought, let’s see how they work out. Because you’re never going to get two great movies. You’re going to end on Defying Gravity: How do you make that the emotional core of the movie so it feels satisfying? They’re not confronted with wizards. That’s not what the story is about in movie one. Glinda doesn’t make the big decision in the end. So this has got to be Elphaba’s journey, so you have to go backwards. We have to see her childhood.”
As Chu realised, there had to be a reason for non-Wicked fans to want to come back for more, and that meant expanding the story to include more about Elphaba’s past. He concluded:
“We had to really build all of that into this movie. Otherwise, we’d be at the end of movie one, and we would just have the Wicked theater fans, which are great, but you need more than that.”
‘Wicked: For Good’ Is One of 2025’s Most Anticipated Movies
Turning a Broadway musical, something that usually has a runtime of just over two and a half hours, into a movie seems like it shouldn’t be a hard thing to do. The story is written, the plot points are all in place, and the length is just right for a cinema audience. Yet many musical movies have completely failed over the years, including Cats, one of the best known musicals of all time.
Wicked ended up being almost as long as the entire stage show, but only told half the story, and that was where the film won its audience. Theater musicals are driven by one thing; the soundtrack. The story is secondary to the need to move from one song to the next, and most of the time, the songs alone are enough to give a good sense of the plot without anything in between. On screen though, there needs to be more. Plot holes are more noticeable, missing details instantly rob the story of its ability to get an audience invested. Wicked avoided that by massively expanding the details and the bits between the songs.
Wicked: For Good is now doing the same thing, with new songs and more plot. Whether it can reach the heights of its predecessor, who knows, but there will be millions heading to cinemas this November to find out. Wicked: For Good opens on November 21 and has already broken the record for the highest first-day presale of 2025.
- Release Date
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November 21, 2025
- Writers
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Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox, Gregory Maguire
- Producers
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Marc Platt