Just like Galinda dropping the precious "a" from her name, Stephen Schwartz knows that sometimes, things need to be cut for the greater good. In the case of musical writing, that meant that certain ideas he really loved never found their way into the original production of Wicked. Now, he has a second chance. "Without any spoilers, there is one scene that we always wanted to do, and briefly had written, but never made it into the show, and a version of that did make it into… well, as far as I know at this time, in the edit, a version of that has currently made it back into movie two," he told Variety in a recent interview.
Per producer Marc Platt, who was also heavily involved in the stage show, all updates to the original material had to be "additive." (Meaning "It couldn’t be a change just for its own sake.") Songs and scenes that weren't good enough to make the cut in 2003 weren't reinstated, but new ones (including one song co-written by Cynthia Erivo that had "the entire crew… in tears") were written from scratch and will appear in the second film—recently deemed Wicked: For Good.
Even so, Schwartz and Oremus "weren’t waiting" for the movie to be officially greenlit to start dreaming up those additions, at least amongst themselves. "[W]e were constantly talking about, when we do the movie, what if we do this?—constantly investigating things we could do, some of which were definitely cul-de-sacs and wrong turns and dead ends," Schwartz said. "It wasn’t as if the idea of doing a movie was just sitting on a shelf and we paid no attention to it." That means the films are based not just on one static production or cast album, but a story that's been evolving for nearly two decades in the minds of its creators.
"We were more or less constantly thinking about and working on the movie, so that when we finally got the chance to make it—and I think it happened at the right time—there was a lot of back story and back work, preparatory work, that all of us had done," Schwartz explained. The team had "always wanted" to find a way to bring original Broadway stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth back, for example, but it was movie director Jon M. Chu's idea to do it through the expanded "Wizomania" scene (another idea Schwartz and Oremus had been tossing around for a while).
We'll find out what other tricks they've had up their sleeves when Wicked: For Good premieres November 21, 2025. For now, you can read the rest of the behind-the-scenes interview over at Variety.
