It’s not polite to comment when someone takes seconds at the Thanksgiving dinner table. And yet, this holiday season, “Wicked: For Good” is asking the world to watch as Universal double-dips on the magic of Jon M. Chu’s Oscar-winning musical from last year.
Starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (again), this paltry sequel adapts and expands on the second half of the beloved Broadway show from 2003. “Wicked: For Good” has already made more than $223 million at the global box office. But with 69 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 58 percent on Metacritic, it’s a disappointment by most other metrics.
IndieWire’s Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio projected a tough awards season ahead for the film on their most recent episode of Screen Talk. Lackluster follow-ups are tough to swallow in the best of circumstances, but “Wicked: For Good” feels like extra nasty backwash in 2025.
There’s all that timely political messaging that got fumbled. But the sequel also comes amid one of the worst box office seasons in recent memory. For several weeks, we’ve watched critically acclaimed movies fail to secure the audiences that critics said they deserved. Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia” has yet to make its money back despite stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons (though digital rentals, where the studios take in up to 80 percent of the profits, started today). And even bigger hits like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” have inspired analysts like IndieWire’s Brian Welk to ask, “What even is a box-office flop anymore?”
“Wicked: For Good” will still make oceans of money in ticket sales and buckets more when you account for its pink-and-green Cynthia/Ariana merchandising. But the film industry borrows against itself by insulting hungry audiences with a bad strategy we know doesn’t work.
Give a Mouse a Cliffhanger, He’ll Make Harry Potter… Jump Off It?
TV shows and books have capitalized on cliffhangers ever since Thomas Hardy’s “A Pair of Blue Eyes” left its hero literally dangling from a rock in 1873. The Wachowskis’ “Matrix” trilogy broke ground by shooting the sequels “Reloaded” and “Revolutions” simultaneously and releasing them just six months apart — a strategy tried on earlier films and sharpened to blockbuster success in 2003. That year, Quentin Tarantino also cut “Kill Bill” in half. Saving the finale for spring, the samurai epic proved auteurs could be series unto themselves.
That same strategy eventually gave us the most lucrative franchises of the century. From the Star Wars sequels to Peter Jackson’s epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the trend culminated in the $32 billion Marvel Cinematic Universe that analysts agree has helped redefine “success” at the movies today.
J.K. Rowling did the same for books in the late ’90s, introducing young adults to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and steadily expanding it into a reliable touchstone of global pop culture. “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” gained massive audiences, too, and even lesser YA best-sellers like “Percy Jackson & the Olympians” ended up on the big screen.
When the Harry Potter story concluded on the page, the movie version needed to feel just as big as the ending already on shelves. Running 784 pages in most editions, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was a long book, no doubt. But Warner Bros.’ decision to release the finale as two parts between 2010 and 2011 was an international news item. The movies did well for the studio and director David Yates, receiving widespread critical acclaim and a total of five Oscar nominations between them. They fared even better on the financial front, with “Part 1” grossing $960 million worldwide and “Part 2” raking in $1.3 billion.
“Twilight,” “Hunger Games,” and the Beginning of the End(s)
Other franchises followed suit. Both “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” bifurcated their finales, and the collective four films still did major blockbuster numbers at the box office. But it soon became clear the strategy that had worked so well for Harry Potter was already turning sour.
Between 2011 and 2012, the “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” duology earned $967 million internationally, grossing $430 million on “Part 1” and $537 million on “Part 2.” Compare that to “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay,” released between 2014 and 2015, which made $782 million worldwide despite a sharp decline in ticket sales; $418 million for “Part 1” dropped to $364 million for “Part 2.”
Where Warner Bros. and Yates delivered cinematic work worthy of a two-movie event, Summit Entertainment and Lionsgate spurred their filmmakers to stumble over the finish line. “Breaking Dawn” director Bill Condon and “Mockingjay” director Francis Lawrence were lambasted for taking hugely popular series and making them feel overly long for the wrong reasons. (Note that Lawrence has since righted that wrong with an excellent “Hunger Games” prequel.)
“Twilight” was never considered the pinnacle of storytelling, but “Hunger Games” did particularly poorly trying to follow up the fervor of 2013’s “Catching Fire.” The series’ first sequel is still regarded by many as the best installment in the franchise, but the bloated two-part take is brutal to watch. There wasn’t enough source material to work with, and thanks to the novel’s dystopian setting, the second half felt almost too depressing for fantasy fans in packed theaters.
Why Hollywood May Never Learn This Lesson
Lionsgate doubled down on YA fiction in the early 2010s, pushing its adaptation of the “Divergent” series as another global event. Starring Shailene Woodley, the sci-fi franchise never made it to the finale, effectively imploding mid-story between parts. When 2015’s “Insurgent” underperformed at the same time “Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2” faltered, that set up 2016’s “Allegiant: Part 1” for a fail. Bad reviews didn’t stop the movie from turning a profit (estimated at $71 million), but “Part 2” died in development as a drawn-out mistake.
That storied nosedive — or, at the least, the wisdom behind it — has kept the two-part doldrums at bay and out of box offices for most of the last decade. With more story than most filmmakers could handle, Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” adaptation from 2021 and 2024 needed to be two parts to make sense. And it’ll be up to director Nia DaCosta to stick the landing on Danny Boyle’s original “28 Years” Later trilogy, which doesn’t adapt anything but, like Jon Chu’s new musical, prolongs a metaphor for fascism.
Yet the writing was on the wall when it came to “Wicked: For Good.” Universal turned what could have been one excellent “Wicked” movie into one great one and one really bad one. Exhausting and dark, the second half of this once-excellent adaptation may tarnish Chu’s legacy among fans, critics, and Academy voters. But with its ending left open to spinoffs, and history repeating itself on almost every other global stage, the wicked ways of the two-part finale strategy seem likely to ride again.