The Wicked Trailer Doesn't Want You To Know It's A Musical (And That It's Two Movies)
There was music in the air throughout Super Bowl LVIII. Usher wooed the masses with his singing at the halftime show, and even Ryan Gosling outed himself as a Swiftie in a brand-new trailer for "The Fall Guy." But you know the one place where there wasn't any onscreen singing? The game's first look trailer for "Wicked," "In the Heights" director Jon M. Chu's upcoming two-part film adaptation of one of the most pop-u-lar stage musicals in Broadway history.
Save for a few snippets of off-screen singing (including Cynthia Erivo belting out the show-stopping "Defying Gravity"), the "Wicked' trailer was devoted exclusively to spoken dialogue. This isn't anything new, either. "Wonka," "The Color Purple," and "Mean Girls" were almost single-handedly responsible for keeping theaters afloat in January, yet you might have not realized these films were full of singing and dancing if you went in having only watched their trailers. It's generally accepted that musicals are a hard sell for modern audiences (considering I've spent the past week re-listening to songs from "Hazbin Hotel" on an endless loop, I can safely say my personal tastes don't apply here), which is why studios have to more or less trick them into watching one. Even the marketing for "Wish" went out of its way to avoid spotlighting the film's songs, and that was a friggin' Disney movie.
The other thing the "Wicked" trailer conveniently leaves out is that it's a two-parter, with the first movie premiering in late 2024 and the second in 2025. It's been nearly two years since Universal announced the split, although you can understand why the studio is inclined to keep that detail under wraps here, given that being a two-parter is almost as much of a stigma at the box office as being a musical these days.
To split or not to split
"Wicked" being split into two films has always been a controversial move, particularly since the stage show is only roughly two and a half hours long (minus intermission). Stephen Schwartz, who penned the songs for the original Broadway musical, has tried to justify this decision in the past, stating that while "Defying Gravity" works great in the original show at the end of the first act, anything that came after it in a movie would feel "anticlimactic." Producer Marc Platt further tried to justify the decision in an interview with Vanity Fair timed to coincide with the Super Bowl trailer:
"We didn't want to end up making one four-hour movie and then cutting out songs. We want to satisfy the fans of the musical. Film allows you to create a place and a time — a university like Shiz, an extraordinary Emerald City governor's mansion. There's so much more to explore."
Hiding the fact that "Wicked" is two films makes sense for the trailer: audiences are hesitant to pay for only half a story. We saw this when "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One" performed weaker than anticipated at the box office just last year, spurring Paramount to drop "Part One" for its release on Paramount+ and retitle its follow-up. However, that wasn't the case for "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," which hid any indication it was the first half of a two-parter in its marketing (as did "Dune").
Creatively, I'm not convinced this split is a great idea either. The "Wicked" films will include brand-new songs and story material to fill out their runtime, which sounds an awful lot like Disney turning one of its tightly-paced 90-minute animated classics into a bloated two-hour-plus live-action affair. Hopefully, I'll be proven wrong about that.
"Wicked: Part One" hits theaters on November 27, 2024, with "Part Two" following in 2025.