The acclaimed Broadway musical "Wicked" stunned with its big screen adaption, quickly becoming a hit at the box office and captivating audiences around the world.
"Wicked” was expected to snare $114 million during its domestic opening, the highest debut of a Broadway adaptation in cinematic history, according to Sunday estimates.
The film didn't include every single detail of the stage production, though it was much longer than a typical movie -- at roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes. As a result, Universal made the choice to split the epic "Wizard of Oz" prequel in half along the play's two-act structure, according to NBC Insider.
But the structure was an unexpected twist -- one that not even super fans were ready for.
As the opening title graphic notes, this film represents the first "act" of the full story. At the end of the movie -- and a major cliffhanger -- viewers learn about a forthcoming second movie: the second part of a two-part series.
"Wicked: Part Two" is scheduled to hit the big screen on Nov. 21, 2025.
The release date marks one year (minus a day) after the first installment which premiered on Friday, Nov. 22.
Local
The decision to split the big screen adaptation into a pair of feature-length movies was announced in 2022 by director John Chu.
"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," he wrote on social media. "As we tried to cut songs or trim characters, those decisions began to feel like fatal compromises to the source material that has entertained us all for so many years. So we decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas and make not just one WICKED movie, but TWO!!!! With more space, we can tell the story of WICKED as it was meant to be told while bringing even more depth and surprise to the journeys of these beloved characters."
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly Chicago Catch-Up newsletter.
What do we know about part 2 so far?
The film's first act ends the same way the musical's first act.
Elphaba delivers her iconic performance of "Defying Gravity," in which she flies off on a broomstick after she and Glinda learn the Wizard is nothing but a power-hungry fraud.
The second act is expected to take the audience into Dorothy's adventure from the perspective of Elphaba, who is now feared by the citizens of Oz.
"The first tells how Elphaba becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and the second tells how her best friend, Glinda, becomes authentically good," Marc Platt teases in the production notes.
