We’ll admit it – when we first heard that the hit stage musical Wicked was being split into two separate films, we’ll admit we rolled our eyes a little bit.
The whole thing felt a little like a cash-grab, and given that the original West End show clocks in at under three hours, we were a little nervous about how much padding would need to be added into the mix to make separating it into two movies worth it.
Having now seen the first part of Wicked, we’re happy to hold up our hands and say our cynicism was misguided, but the second that cheeky “to be continued…” flashed up on screen at the end of Defying Gravity, we’ve been wishing we could have jumped straight into the next slice of the action.
The question is… when will we be able to?
Well, the good news is, parts one and two of Wicked were shot back to back, so we don’t need to wait for them to film it, and we even already have a release date of 21 November 2025 (almost a year to the day after the first half hit cinemas).
Although staples like Defying Gravity, Dancing Through Life and Popular are all over and done with now, fans still have big-hitters like the heartbreaking friendship ballad For Good, the oh-so-dramatic Elphaba solo No Good Deed and the passionate duet As Long As You’re Mine (we know this one’s a bit divisive but we love it) to look forward to in part two – plus two brand new songs from Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz.
Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey will, of course, also be back for the sequel, but without wishing to spoil too much, we can expect some secondary characters like Boq and Nessarose to feature in the follow-up.
We’re also hoping for more from Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James, whose characters didn’t originally appear in the stage musical, but felt a little underused in part one.
One thing that remains a mystery, though, is how big a part the character of Dorothy will play in the next part of the story.
While she’s obviously the lead in The Wizard Of Oz, the character never actually makes an appearance in the Wicked stage musical (though she is referred to repeatedly throughout Act II).
However, with more time to flesh out the story, fans have been speculating the character could be a more prominent part of this new retelling of Wicked, with musical performer Alisha Weir already being tipped to play the part.
“In the show, Dorothy is around,” Wicked director Jon M Chu recently told Variety. “They have to intersect, and you can only tease it so much.
“I won’t say whether she’s a character, necessarily, in movie two. There’s a part of me that wants everyone’s Dorothy to be the whatever Dorothy they want. And yet, there is interaction and some crossover. So I’ll leave that up to Part Two.”
He added: “The Wizard of Oz is potentially a dream. It’s a world where there are no real stakes.
“Knowing that Elphaba and Glinda live in a world of real stakes, we had to reestablish with the audience that this was real. So we dropped everyone into the crime scene, maybe the most famous crime scene ever in cinema and literature, of the iconic hat in the puddle.
“There are all these little clues before we see the full landscape of Oz. It’s this living, breathing place with real cultures, so we immediately establish this is not a dream world. After we go somewhere over the rainbow, we see that those four iconic characters exist in this real world. And we will revisit those characters in movie two.”
More recently, Jon told Entertainment Weekly of the next insalment: ““If Part 1 is about choices, Part 2 is about consequences. Choices are difficult to make, but when you do make those choices, sometimes the result isn’t what you expect it to be. It can be lonely, it can be hard.”
“There’s a lot of soul searching in movie 2,” he added. “They’re asking, ‘Is this the right decision that you made?’”
For now, though, the first part of Wicked is still in cinemas.
