Everything you should know before watching Wicked

So you’re going to watch Wicked, the big movie musical based on the second highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time, based on Gregory Maguire’s 2000 novel Wicked, based on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (And only partly influenced by the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, which, unlike Baum’s books, isn’t in the public domain.) That’s a pretty complicated lineage for anything hitting the screen, and you may have some questions. Or maybe you think you don’t have questions, because you don’t quite realize what you’re getting into here — and you aren’t alone, based on some of the responses people have had after watching the movie. We can help.

Let’s get that out of the way first: It’s two hours and 40 minutes long. And nope, there’s no post-credits scene, mid-credits scene, dancing animated characters during the credits — nothing fun like that. Once the big halftime number plays, you’re free to go contemplate the cliffhanger you just experienced.

You don’t become the second highest-grossing Broadway musical in history without showstopping song-and-dance routines. Wicked is full of song-and-dance numbers penned by legendary Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Schwartz. Arguably, it isn’t much of a movie without the musical numbers, which convey most of the important information and all of the important emotions, and provide all the spectacle.

But movie studios don’t love to sell movie musicals to the masses. Case in point: When I saw the 2024 Mean Girls movie, some attendees in my theater were vocally surprised and annoyed to learn it was a musical, because the trailers largely disguised the fact that it centered on singing and dancing. The same thing happened with 2023’s The Color Purple and Wonka — it’s become pretty standard for movie-musical marketing to hide the fact that the movie has music. Most of Wicked’s trailers followed suit, disguising the fact that it was a musical right up until a month before release.

Keep in mind that the marketers aren’t the same people who are greenlighting or making these movies — they’re just coming along afterward and figuring out how to sell what someone else made. But that said, my best guess is that studios remain endlessly beholden to known, familiar, and popular IP — and a show that’s made more than $1.6 billion on Broadway is seen as having a built-in audience. But anyway. All that explains “number,” but we haven’t gotten to “halftime” or “cliffhanger” yet.

Nope! It’s the first half of the Broadway show — the first of two acts. The title in the initial advertising was Wicked. The on-screen title is Wicked — Part 1. In marketing, though, it’s now being billed as Wicked: Part I. Maybe this is only confusing to fact-checkers and copy-editors, but let me tell you, we don’t love it. Anyway, the movie ends right at the act break, with the song “Defying Gravity,” just when things are really getting serious.

Nov. 21, 2025 — basically a year from Wicked: Part I’s original release. The official title was originally Wicked Part 2: For Good, but judging from current marketing materials, it looks like now it’s just Wicked: Part II.

Kinda does!

It’s 165 minutes, including both acts and a 15-minute intermission. Crazy, right?

Wicked: Part I is longer because a lot more non-musical narrative scenes have been added, drawing from the Gregory Maguire book the Broadway musical adapted. For one thing, “Defying Gravity” itself feels weirdly hyper-extended, due to the action scenes and dialogue that interrupt the song between verses. The movie also spends more time with its eventual wicked witch, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), in childhood, and more time on scenes of her rivalry and friendship with classmate and roommate Galinda (Ariana Grande).

Wicked: Part II will be longer because it will add two new songs written by Schwartz, according to the composer himself. Given the second act’s big time-jumps through Elphaba’s career as a witch, which the stage musical skips past, it also wouldn’t be surprising if Part II follows Part I’s lead and fills in some of the gaps with more character work.

Finally, it’s possible Part II will reprise some of Part I’s songs (at least, more than the original Broadway musical already does) to extend its length and/or let it trade a little more heavily on the iconic moments and songs from Act I of the show. That seems relatively unlikely, since director John M. Chu considers himself a big fan of the Broadway musical — but it may be a necessary practicality for two halves of a story being told a year apart.

Maguire has made an entire career out of retelling fairy tales as complicated literary novels, but he always comes back to the Wicked series, which isn’t just Elphaba’s story: Later novels in the series center on Elphaba’s son and granddaughter, with one side book, A Lion Among Men, spending more time with the Cowardly Lion. They’re well worth reading if you enjoy dense, thoughtful literary fantasy — the first book in the series, fully titled as Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, is a particularly rich character study that’s a lot more narratively complicated than the stage musical or the movie.

You’re sure you want to know? This is where we cross the line into “Some people want to know going in, and some don’t.”

Yep, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth have a cute musical cameo in the middle of “One Short Day,” when Elphaba and Galinda (by that point in the story, just “Glinda”) are speed-touring the Emerald City, and stop to watch a stage show called Wizomania, which offers some exposition about the Wizard of Oz and the magical book the Grimmerie, which is naturally about to become important. Menzel and Chenoweth come out on stage together in elaborate gowns to sing about the city’s history — and elbow each other a bit in mock diva rivalry as they try to upstage each other.

Isn’t she spectacular? You can see her starring in the 2019 Harriet Tubman movie Harriet — and mostly not singing, though she did write and perform the soundtrack song “Stand Up,” which earned her an Oscar nomination.

She also starred in HBO’s Stephen King miniseries The Outsider as Holly Gibney, the neurodivergent sleuth who’s become one of King’s favorite returning characters over the past two decades. She sings as the Blue Fairy in Disney’s little-loved live-action Pinocchio, and stars as Aretha Franklin in season 3 of Genius, the anthology show where each season profiles a different creator.

But for our money, the best place to see her on film if Wicked gave you the Cynthia Erivo itch is in Bad Times at the El Royale, the 2018 neo-noir directed by The Cabin in the Woods’ Drew Goddard. She does it all in Bad Times: sings, stars, sweats it out in a tense situation, and hangs out with a shirtless Chris Hemsworth. If Wicked’s cliffhanger leaves you a little unsatisfied and you don’t want to just go see the Broadway show or read Maguire’s book, Bad Times is your best next step.