Given that Wicked was a box office sensation and one of the highest-grossing movies of 2024, it already seems like a brilliant idea to break the hit musical into two separate films. Even if Wicked: For Good doesn’t resonate as well with audiences as its predecessor, it will certainly make enough money to justify the endeavor. But before he released the movie into the world like so many flying monkeys, the films’ director wasn’t so sure about the bifurcated story.
“You’re never going to get two great movies,” Jon M. Chu admitted to thinking, as he shared with attendees at the BFI London Film Festival (via Deadline). “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.”
Yet, as nervous as he was, Chu also had to acknowledge that an earlier draft of the film, which covered the entire story in one movie, wasn’t satisfying either. “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,” described Chu. “They had taken out songs, and it just didn’t feel like Wicked.”
So instead, Chu made a movie that greatly expanded on the Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman musical by adding details and backstory from the source novel by Gregory Maguire. The result is a first movie that’s already 10 minutes longer than the entire musical, before adding the upcoming film.
