Wicked: For Good is already turning out to be Wicked: For A Hell Of A Lot Of Money

Jon M. Chu's big, flashy sequel is on track to outperform the original Wicked in its opening weekend at the box office.

By William Hughes | November 22, 2025 | 3:04pm

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked: For Good. Photo: Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures

Film News Wicked: For Good

Wicked: For Good is already turning out to be Wicked: For A Hell Of A Lot Of Money

Sequel/second part of a thing that was originally just one thing Wicked: For Good is already set to “defy” slightly tepid critical opinions, and maintain its “popular”ity at the box office. (Is it bad that we can only come up with dumb, forced little puns that reference songs from the first act of the original stage musical? It feels like that might be a problem for a film entirely based on the second.) Regardless of our own linguistic difficulties, though, Jon M. Chu’s movie musical is already on track to have one of the biggest box office openings of the year, easily eclipsing the response that greeted last year’s Wicked.

This is per The Hollywood Reporter, which notes that For Good is on track to have a $151 million opening in domestic territories, and $228 million worldwide. Those are massive numbers, especially for 2025, which has seen only a handful of movies crack the $100 million opening mark at the domestic box office. (The most recent was Fantastic Four: First Steps, all the way back in July.) Those early numbers also put the film in contention to be one of the biggest musical movies ever, a list that is mostly filled with more recent Disney installments, including the continues-to-be-ludicrous-to-us success of the CGI Lion King remake, as well as, well, the original Wicked.

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We’ll note that critics have been less kind to For Good, noting that its story (adapted from Gregory Maguire’s revisionist take on The Wizard Of Oz) bogs itself down in both grimness and prequel nonsense that the first movie mostly got around by focusing on the breezier parts of Elphaba and Glinda’s story. (Also, again, it’s hard to overstate what a boon being able to end on Cynthia Erivo belting out “Defying Gravity” was.) None of which has dissuaded audiences, who’ve come out in significantly more force than they did for the original film, which opened to $112.5 million a year ago today.

Suffice it to say that the film is clearly also going to stomp the shit out of everything else at the weekend box office; per Variety, its nearest competitor, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t will bring in just shy of $10 million in its second week in theaters, while Predator: Badlands, The Running Man, and Rental Family will bring up the rear.