'Wicked' Starring Ariana Grande Split Into Two Movies, Released a Year Apart
The Wicked film adaptation will feature Grande and Cynthia Erivo in roles originated on Broadway by Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel.
Ariana Grande's run as Glinda will now span two films.
To fully experience Universal's film adaptation of Wicked, we'll now have to wait until December 2025.
In a letter posted to Twitter on Tuesday, Wicked director Jon M. Chu shared that what was originally slated to be a single film would now arrive in two parts. The first movie hits theaters in December 25, 2024, followed by another one on the same day in 2025.
Special #Wicked Movie Announcement… ✌🏼🎬🧹🌸💚sent from my OzPhone: pic.twitter.com/4qPpvVD4rR
— Jon M. Chu (@jonmchu) April 26, 2022
"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," Chu wrote. "So we decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas and make not just one Wicked movie but two."
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are set to star respectively as Glinda and Elphaba in the two films, which will adapt Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel and is set before Dorothy's arrival in Oz. In the musical's original Broadway run, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth portrayed Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba, who would eventually become the Wicked Witch of the West.
