No good deed goes unpunished and Jon M. Chu’s Wickedseriously... we can’t stress enough just how long theater kids have been waiting for this), the production has been racked with scandal since day one. Somewhere, Shiz-era Galinda is reading an Ozian gossip rag and giggling and kicking her feet.
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First, there was a whole lot of skepticism over whether Ariana Grande actually had the chops to take on a role as challenging as G(a)linda. Then there was the extremely unpopular announcement that the movie would be split into two parts instead of, say, cutting unnecessary fluff like a pretty boring wizard song, “A Sentimental Man.” (Sorry, “A Sentimental Man” fans.) Along the way, there was both a massive anti-James Corden movement and a minor lip-synching scandal. In July, the actors strike shut down production with only a few days to go, but even then, only a crystal ball could have predicted the tornado that would strike less than a week later: Ariana Grande was dating her co-star Ethan Slater. That’s not even to mention the revelation from just last week that Chu edited part of the movie using an Apple Vision Pro headset. We don’t have time to unpack all of that right now, but... whew.
All of this to say: it’s been an unbelievably long road, but we finally have concrete proof that Wicked: Part One is a real movie that we’ll actually be able to watch one day. We will hear Erivo hit the “Defying Gravity” riff in a trailer that is very visually reverent to the original 1939 movie! Good news!
Grab your bubbles and brooms, everyone. Wicked: Part One finally hits theaters November 27.