The various forces of the NBCUniversal corporation are apparently worried that folks will come in to next month’s sequel Wicked: For Good without sufficient familiarity with the plot of the original story. (“Wait, there’s a green one and a pink one?” “Why’s that monkey flying?” “This Jeff Golblum fella seems like he’s up to no good!”) And so they’re going for an old-school option to make sure we’re all nicely plopped down on the same page when it comes to Jon M. Chu’s two-part Broadway adaptation: Running the first Wicked on NBC on the Wednesday night right before the sequel’s premiere.
That’s right: It’s a Wednesday night movie, with the blockbuster landing on the network on the evening of November 19, just two days before the official opening of For Good. Now no one will have any excuses for mixing their Fiyeros up with their Boqs, or wondering why Bowen Yang is in so much of the promotional material for these movies, when he’s only in the first one for, like, a minute total. (Answer there: He’s very famous!)
It’s not like Wicked itself needs the boost: The film ended up making more than $750 million at the box office, and has been well-received on streaming. That being said, there’s always been a certain nervousness coming off of Universal when it comes to the fact that the movie was getting split up into two parts, each adhering to one of the original stage play’s acts. Chu himself has expressed weirdly vehement disdain for calling the second movie something as prosaic as Wicked: Part 2, and it seems like execs are worried that the second film’s audience will, by default, be limited to those who’ve seen the original. Which we guess is the kind of thing that makes you happy to own a massive TV network you can tap to shore up familiarity, even if you have to bump your usual Wednesday night slate of Dick Wolf Chicago shows for a week to do it.
[via Variety]
