Wicked wasn’t always going to be split into two parts as it went from stage to screen, though now it feels crazy to imagine it as one movie.
In a new interview with Universal’s Seen on the Screen podcast, producer Marc Platt — who produced both the 2003 stage production of Wicked and the movies — explained how the decision came about. First, producers looked at the length of the musical itself, which is around two and a half hours already.
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“From the very beginnings of developing the script with [director] Jon M. Chu, we knew that there was much in the stage production that was beloved and that we didn’t want to have to start cutting things if we felt they belonged in the story,” Platt said. “We knew going into it that meant it was going to be a really long film. That’s the first inkling we had…Is there a version where it’s two?”
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Platt had been working with original Wicked composer-songwriter Stephen Schwartz and writer Winnie Holzman from the beginning. They knew there was a lot of story left on the cutting room floor from when they crafted the original 2003 musical.
“When we were doing the stage play, there were many ideas, particularly in the second half of the play, that we had to discard,” Platt said. “…So we never got to go down some roads that we probably would have. We said, ‘If we ever make a movie, let’s really elaborate here.'”
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But the idea of two movies really gained steam when looking at the stories told in the two acts of the musical and the character arcs of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande).
“The two movies, Wicked and Wicked: For Good, actually have very different character journeys, and thus character structure, to them,” Platt said. “The first film…is Elphaba’s journey, going from a girl who feels wounded and hurt and wants to be loved to someone who comes into her own power and then knows and understands that she needs to speak truth to power, and thus decides to defy gravity…to let the world call her wicked, because she can’t live until she tells the truth that the Wizard is a fraud. She changes in the course of that film. In the second part of Wicked, she pretty much remains that character.”
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Glinda, meanwhile, has the opposite journey.
“Glinda remains pretty much Glinda in the first film,” he continued. “She befriends Elphaba, that’s very genuine, but at the end, she makes a choice to remain Glinda and do what Glinda would have done at the beginning of the film, which is stay with the Wizard and buy into the popularity and the fun and the beauty of the Emerald City. In the second part of Wicked, Glinda is the character who actually takes the longest emotional journey and changes in the course of the story…So once we understood that there’s actually two different journeys, it felt like it actually wants to be two films, and that’s where it got clinched for us.”
Between the two films, we get almost five hours (4 hours, 57 minutes) of Wicked content, plus two press tours, two soundtracks, and two Ariana Grande-hosted Saturday Night Live episodes. We wouldn’t have it any other way!
Wicked: For Good hits theaters November 21.