Wicked Movie To Be Split Into Two Films Coming In 2024 And 2025

Something Wicked this way comes...

Jon M. Chu took to social media to share that his upcoming musical adaptation of Wicked will be split into two films. Wicked will star Ariana Granda and Cynthia Erivo in the leading roles of Glinda and Elphaba and is next up on Chu’s roster after adapting the musical In The Heights for film.

“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,” Chu tweeted his statement. “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.”

A prequel reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, Wicked started out as a book by author Gregory Maguire that told a revisionist story of what happened before Dorothy arrived in Oz. It was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2003 with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth playing Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, or Galinda, the Good Witch.

The first Wicked film will drop December 25, 2024, while the second film will hit theaters a year later on December 25, 2025.