Wicked: Part One has captivated audiences this past week since the movie based on the hit Broadway musical flew into theaters and blew every expectation out of the water, bagging $112.5 million during its domestic opening, a figure which climbed to $144.9 million this week, and a total of $194.9 million grossed worldwide in the film’s opening week.
Starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, Wicked: Part One has dominated the conversation this week, with snippets from the film becoming TikTok memes and a viral interview of a journalist who informed Erivo and Grande that people were “holding space” for the lyrics of the film’s climactic song, Defying Gravity.
Universal Studios
If you’ve been online this past week, you’ve likely also found yourself caught in the Wicked web, and the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, has teased that there’s plenty more to come in part two, which hits theaters in 2025.
“Movie one is about choices,” says Chu, “and how hard it is to make choices.”
Based on the first act of the musical, Wicked: Part One tells us how the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda blossomed during their time at university and shows us how Elphaba’s magic gets taken advantage of by Madame Morrible and The Wizard in order to silence the animals of Oz.
“It gets messier in movie two,” says Chu. “You are in the mud from the very beginning, and this beautiful, perfect, simple fairytale suddenly becomes very complicated.”
Wicked: Part One stays very close to Act One of the Broadway musical in terms of only adding in one additional musical moment in the middle of “One Short Day“.
However, in Wicked: Part Two “We have two new songs,” says Chu, “that I can’t talk about yet, but they’re very very fantastic.”
What those songs will be and where they’ll be placed are yet to be revealed, but Wicked: Part Two is due to hit theaters on November 21, 2025, so it will likely be a while before we hear any more about them.
