Why was Wicked split into two movies? One song made a single film impossible
Wicked's two movies run more than two hours longer than the Broadway show. The director and the composer agree on which number forced the split.
Universal released Wicked on November 22, 2024, and Wicked: For Good on November 21, 2025. Put together, they run almost five hours, against 2 hours and 45 minutes for the stage show, intermission included. When Jon M. Chu announced in April 2022 that the adaptation would be two films, the obvious suspicion was money.
Chu and the show's composer, Stephen Schwartz, kept giving a different answer, and it comes down to one song.
What Chu and Schwartz said
Chu's original announcement said it had become "impossible to wrestle the story of Wicked into a single film" without doing it real damage. Schwartz explained the details in the summer 2022 issue of his newsletter, The Schwartz Scene. Even as one very long film, he wrote, the story "required us cutting or omitting things" the team wanted to keep. The second problem was the song.
"We found it very difficult to get past 'Defying Gravity' without a break."
— Stephen Schwartz, composer, in The Schwartz Scene
On Broadway, "Defying Gravity" ends Act 1. The song is built to bring the curtain down, Schwartz explained, and any scene that followed it straight away felt like an anticlimax.
The song the movie couldn't get past
Chu has described the one-film attempt in blunter terms. "We tried to make it into one movie, and you had to rip out songs and it became not Wicked," he told GamesRadar+ in November 2024.
The split didn't just give "Defying Gravity" a place to land. It also gave the song room to change:
- The structure: Played the way it is in the show, Chu said, the song doesn't feel like the end of an epic journey. "So we had to break that up a little bit, which is scary."
- The setup: Elphaba "has to earn it," so the film's version brings back the doubts the movie has put on her before she takes off.
- The lyrics: Chu ruled out the easy fix. "And you're not going to add new words to it."
He told io9 that getting the number right was "hell on Earth." He also wasn't sold on two films at first. At the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025, he said his first reaction was "You're never going to get two great movies," and that the earlier single-movie draft didn't feel like a real movie.
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What the extra time bought
Splitting the show gave the films a lot of room the stage version never had. Wicked runs 2 hours and 40 minutes, and For Good runs 2 hours and 18 minutes, per BroadwayWorld. The second film used its share for material the musical doesn't have:
- Two new Schwartz songs: "No Place Like Home" for Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba and "The Girl in the Bubble" for Ariana Grande's Glinda.
- A new version of "Wonderful": Now with Glinda in it.
- More of Oz: Dorothy Gale shows up, and Glinda gets a wedding.
The money question answered itself too. Wicked finished its run at $758 million worldwide. For Good opened to $150 million in North America and $226 million globally, per TheWrap, the biggest opening ever for a Broadway adaptation, and passed $500 million worldwide by the end of December 2025.
Critics were cooler on the second half. The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote that too much of it plays like "Oz the World Turns."
Wicked was split in two so that "Defying Gravity" could end a movie. It ended up ending the better-reviewed one.
The song that made one film impossible became the last thing audiences heard in the first one, and they had to wait a year for whatever came after the curtain.
Previously we wrote: Birdman ending explained: Iñárritu shot a different ending, and it ended on Johnny Depp