With Jon M Chu’s toe-tapping Wicked film in cinemas now, why is its two-part status getting us all riled up?
It’s all Peter Jackson’s fault, really.
When folks complain about Hollywood’s relatively new obsession with cutting films in half, few seem to be talking about the New Zealand director’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy – if only because the narrative hack-job was done more than 40 years before production started. JRR Tolkien apparently wasn’t best pleased when his publisher insisted on chopping his fantasy epic into some more manageable chunks – by the time New Line was in the mood to put Frodo’s story on-camera, he wasn’t best-placed to complain (he’d died in 1974).
But by the time Return Of The King swept to awards and box office glory in 2004, no one seemed to mind that a single, continuous story had been sold to them in three different film-shaped packages. For one thing, annoyingly, all three parts were really very good. For another, it’s not like audiences didn’t know what they were getting into – it’s not like The Fellowship Of The Ring arrived in cinemas pretending to adapt the entire, three volume tale of the biggest fantasy epic on the planet.
The same can’t exactly be said for Wicked, arriving in cinemas worldwide this weekend. Sharing a title with the Broadway smash it’s adapted from, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume the two-hour 40-minute film contained the whole story of Gregory Maguire’s 1994 novel.
Instead, Jon M Chu’s adaptation cuts the iconic stage story off at the interval. What we can only assume will be called Wicked Part Two is due to hit cinemas in November 2025 – if angry mobs haven’t torn down the concessions stands in the interim.
Multi-part films are nothing new, obviously. The 20th century was gently spattered with the occasional chunky epic, from Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) to Christine Edzard’s nearly six-hour adaptation of Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1987). Few of them – Toxic Avenger parts II and III aside – seemed to have commercial supremacy at the forefront of their minds. Most seemed to be rigorously faithful of important works of 19th-century literature – those were the days…
More recently, however, blockbuster audiences have been burned by two-parters made more for their box office returns than anything else. The decision to split the final Harry Potter book into The Deathly Hallows Parts One & Two was hardly met with universal acclaim, especially when the first part abandoned the usual magic for dour clips of Harry et al hiking in the woods. Even director David Yates has since come round to the idea the split was a mistake – as has Bill Condon, who helmed the fourth and fifth entries in the four-book Twilight saga.
By the time Jackson came back to adapt the famously short The Hobbit into another nine-hour trilogy, it’s hard to argue we didn’t see it coming. Still, for all of the above, the apparent gamble that comes with filming more than one mega-blockbuster back-to-back paid off. The lowest-grossing of all the above, by some margin, was Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part One – it made $712m.
No reason, then, that Wicked Part Two and its un-subtitled prequel couldn’t make a heap of dosh for their home studio. The split, actually, is pulled off rather well – coming in at the culmination of the show’s biggest hit (Defying Gravity) in a way that captures the feeling of seeing the first act of a West End show better than most screen adaptations of existing musicals. And if early box office projections are anything to go by, NBCUniversal’s accounts team will be very happy bunnies.
Read more: Wicked review | A spellbinding musical adaptation
Ever intent on throwing public goodwill under the bus, however, the words “Part” and “One” are conspicuously absent from the tsunami of advertising materials Universal has put out these last few weeks. Hence, most conversations I’ve had around the Wicked movie this month have ended with some derivation of “bastards” – “money-grabbing”, usually.
“Marketing has its own strategy for all those things”, Chu told io9 earlier this week when asked about the decision. For his part, the cast and creative seem to have been very open that their film only tells half a story – they’re only going to have to get back on the interview circuit for the follow-up in six months, anyway.
But it’s hard not to feel cynical about the lack of transparency on show – especially when there’s so much proof that it’s not really necessary. Sure, Dead Reckoning Part One might have made a “paltry” $570m at the box office last year, but that feels more down to Barbie and Oppenheimer’s screen takeover a week after its release than the fact it was upfront about the quantity of story on offer. Dune might have proved a box office smash despite cutting Frank Herbert’s chunky novel into two but, in fairness to the Warner Bros marketing department, Part Two hadn’t actually been green lit when the first film opened (that’s a whole other issue).
One thing people definitely don’t tend to like, however, is feeling tricked. Just look at the viral reaction to this year’s Mean Girls, which saw audiences booing as characters burst into song after the film’s trailers studiously avoided mentioning its musical credentials (a phenomena the Wicked trailers are equally guilty of). When there’s plenty of evidence that sticking “Part One” in a title isn’t the box office poison Hollywood seems to think it is, why bother making everyone so cross when the actual product you’re selling justifies its structure well enough on its own?
Something about this all stinks to me – and it isn’t the colour-changing macaroni cheese…
Wicked is in UK cinemas now. Half of it, anyway…
