Sean Marshall For those of you that thought Universal Pictures’ Wicked film adaption was in development hell, you can relax. Universal finally gave us an update after the film was put on hold in 2018.
Jon M. Chu’s Wicked film will now be separated into two parts to cover the complete story and remain faithful to the source material from the Broadway musical.
Chu said: “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 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. So 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 of these beloved characters.”
The first part of Wicked will be released on December 25, 2024, and the second part will arrive on December 25, 2025. The film will star Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo as Glinda and Elphaba. Production on the film will start this summer in the UK.
Wicked is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman. The musical is based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, based on the characters and setting of the classic 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film The Wizard of Oz. Wicked tells the story of two unlikely friends, Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Galinda, whose name later changes to Glinda the Good Witch, whose relationship struggles through their opposing personalities and viewpoints, rivalry over the same love-interest, reactions to the Wizard’s corrupt government, and, ultimately, Elphaba’s private fall from grace.
