I was so enjoying our temporary Wicked-free peace, but alas, it is over already. The trailer for Wicked: For Good, the second part of the musical’s feature film adaptation, dropped yesterday. Based on the unrelenting Wicked publicity push last year, this marks the official beginning of the For Good press push. Ah, Wicked theme dressing, I missed you not at all.
The trailer looks fine. It’s more Wicked, a thing I already don’t particularly enjoy. I’m especially annoyed at the film adaptation for being split in two, which was solely done for money. Certainly, the filmmakers never figured out how to fully inhabit the expanded runtime. But I was wrong about the first film’s box office. Given the musical’s overwhelming popularity—never mind that Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel was a best-seller—I just assumed the film would be an automatic billion-dollar baby, but it wasn’t. Wicked made $756 million.
That is a huge amount of money, and Wicked was inarguably a hit, I just thought it would be a little bit bigger because, again, the musical is SO popular (this is the same reasoning that Cats was foisted upon us. Am I just Cats-brained?). Now, though, I wonder if splitting the film into two parts held back the box office of Wicked just a bit. There is some evidence that when a film is known to be two parts, audiences will choose to wait for “part two” before buying in. It’s why Marvel changed the names of the final Avengers movies from Infinity War: Part 1 and Infinity War: Part 2, and it’s why the Mission: Impossible franchise course-corrected with their own titles after Dead Reckoning Part 1 underperformed.
Wicked is not titled “part 1” and “part 2”, and I think the marketing folks at Universal tried to hide the two-part structure as long as they could, but it did eventually get out to general audiences that Wicked was split into two films. With $700 million-plus box office, obviously a lot of people went to see Wicked anyway, but I wonder if some people did choose to sit it out, planning to watch it at home before springing for movie tickets for part two. If that is the case, then For Good’s box office should be even bigger. Maybe it will be the billion-dollar baby I’ve expected all along. Also, despite logging ten Oscar nominations, Wicked only went home with two. Will For Good fare better? Will For Good be a Return of the King scenario in which the final film gets all the hardware?
