Jon M. Chu's Wicked will now be split into two parts
The films, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, will premiere in theaters one year apart, with the first arriving in 2024
From the Land of Oz comes an update about Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of Wicked, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. Instead of cramming the story of Glinda and Elphaba into one really long movie, executives at Universal have given clearance to break the feature into two films. It’s the company way of offering a “ bigger canvas” for the cast and crew.
“Here’s what happened: 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,” Chu writes in a statement.