Sent straight from his OzPhone, Jon M. Chu has a special (though controversial) announcement about the upcoming Wicked film adaptation. For all fans who sat through two hours and 30 minutes of the original Broadway production and thought, “Hm, but what if it was longer?”—this one’s for you. All five of you. There will be two new versions of Wicked hitting theaters within the next decade, probably.
“Here’s what happened,” Chu began in his announcement posted to Twitter today. “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. 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.”
Using a whiplash-inducing four exclamation points, Chu then announced that there would be two films in order to give the story “a bigger canvas” and to bring “even more depth and surprise” to the characters.
Though Wicked has become one of the most beloved Broadway shows of the 2000’s, no one thought this choice was for good. “weird how they managed to fit wicked into .. one musical this whole time,” one Twitter user shared, “but now that it’ll be a movie it’s gotta be split into two.”
Then came the jokes, which teased witchcraft, the musical’s future iterations, and the reactions to the news. 2 Wicked 2 Witch? The Wickening? Wick3d? So much potential.
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo have been attached to star as Glinda and Elphaba, respectively, with Chu set to adapt a script from Winnie Holzman, who wrote the original musical. The show is based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West written by Gregory Maguire, a long novel with a flurry of sequels. The Wicked story will never end.
All this extra room for Wicked, but Chu really had to cut Benny’s entire storyline for the film adaptation of In the Heights? Nevertheless, Wicked 1 and Wicked 2 (names pending) will be released in December 2024 and 2025.
