Wicked Director Explains What Makes the Musical Sing on the Big Screen

Wicked fans have been waiting decades to see the hit Broadway musical receive the big-screen Hollywood treatment. When he sat down and began developing his new, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo-led adaptation of the musical, though, director Jon M. Chu realized early on that adapting Wicked wasn’t going to be as simple as just transposing the Broadway version of it onto a Hollywood soundstage. In an interview with ComicBook ahead of the film’s premiere, Chu revealed what separates his version of Wicked from its original, theatrical iteration and explained why he believes the movie lets viewers experience its story in a completely different way than ever before.

“As we were picking it apart, we realized, ‘Oh, you know, in the show, the audience is part of Oz because you walk into a theatre and this green girl [Erivo’s Elphaba] drops in, and she’s the odd one out, so she becomes sort of the joke,’” Chu explained. “In the movie, the audience is different. You have to accept the world that you’re being presented and we have a musical world with dancing. The audience is sitting there waiting to be let in, and then the green girl drops in, and she’s like one of us, so suddenly we’re on her side. She’s like, ‘I just walked into a musical. What the hell am I doing here?’ I love that the joke flips on us, and to understand that perspective shift I think changes the whole movie.”

The Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights filmmaker added that he believes his cinematic approach to Wicked changes and heightens one specific moment early in its story. “In ‘The Wizard and I,’ [Elphaba] just slowly whispers this little tune [when she sings], ‘Did that really just happen?’ And you [realize], ‘She can sing. She can sing better than all of these other people! Oh, my God!’” Chu observed. “That to me is using the medium and cinema to tell this story in a way that you can’t do it on stage.”

Why Wicked‘s Story Became a Two-Part Movie

When Wicked hits theaters this November, fans will, of course, only get to experience one half of the Broadway show’s story. Its second half will be told in Wicked: Part Two, which Chu has already filmed and is set to hit theaters in November 2025. This may come as a shock to some viewers, not only because Wicked hasn’t been aggressively marketed as the first half of a two-part film but also because the forthcoming movie’s 160-minute run time is itself longer than the entire Broadway show, which typically runs around 2 hours and 30 minutes long (not counting its 15-minute intermission).

While speaking with ComicBook, Chu explained his decision to expand Wicked‘s story. “It was about the room [for] the characters that were created on the stage that I felt like the audience needed — or I needed,” the director revealed. “In the theater, we fill in a lot with our heads. I imagined [Elphaba] actually flying around us, so when I went back, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, she doesn’t actually fly around us.’

He continued, “I just wanted to fulfill those moments, and emotionally there are a lot of moments, like what happens when [Elphaba and Glinda] actually move into the dorm room for the first time, that [aren’t] not done in song. … To me, those were really fun elements to just sort of flesh out, and I think as a movie audience you actually need that.”

Wicked hits theaters on Friday, November 22nd. Its sequel, Wicked: Part Two, is set to be released on November 21, 2025.