Why The Wicked Sequel Removed ‘Part Two’ From Its Title

When it was first announced that Jon M. Chu, the director behind movies like “Crazy Rich Asians” and “In the Heights,” would adapt Stephen Schwartz’s hit Broadway musical “Wicked,” news broke shortly thereafter that the movie would be split into two parts. On some level, it does make sense to split “Wicked” in half, giving it a cinematic two-act structure that mimics the stage version. With all of that said the movies were originally called “Wicked: Part One” and “Wicked: Part Two,” and Part One soared into theaters in November 2024, crushing the box office and earning rave reviews from critics. Then, in December of that year, Chu revealed (to Variety, among other outlets) that the second part of the epic film will actually be called “Wicked: For Good,” taking its title from an earnest duet sung by Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) and her best friend turned political enemy Glinda the Good Witch (Ariana Grande-Butera) in the show’s second act.

So why the change? As Chu told Variety in early January of 2025, “For Good” is just … a better title. “Who wants a movie called ‘Wicked: Part Two’?” Chu rhetorically asked the outlet on the red carpet for the National Board of Review awards. “On the script, it always said, ‘For Good,’ and so it was just a point of like, ‘Do we really want to call this “Part Two”?’ And nobody wants that.”

He explained, “I mean, that’s the destination. ‘For Good,’ we know, is like, ‘Where are we going with this movie? Let’s finish this thing,'” Chu continued. All right, then!

Splitting huge movies into two parts is nothing new; ever since “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” got the two-parter treatment back in 2011, studios have (pretty cravenly) tried this over and over again with anticipated releases to try and squeeze more money out of the project. According to Jon M. Chu, though, the story of “Wicked” — which, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is a prequel of sorts to “The Wizard of Oz” based on Gregory Maguire’s novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” which focuses on Elphaba Thropp’s magical (and dark) journey as she becomes the Wicked Witch of the West — was simply too massive to be contained to one film.

“As we prepared this production over the last year, it became increasingly clear that it would be impossible to wrestle the story of ‘Wicked’ into a single film without doing some real damage to it,” Chu wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) while the film was still in early stages back in April of 2022. “As we tried to cut songs or trim characters, those decisions began to feel like fatal compromises to the source material that has entertained us all for so many years. So we decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas and make not just one ‘Wicked’ movie, but TWO!!!! [sic] With more space, we can tell the story of Wicked as it was meant to be told while bringing even more depth and surprise to the journeys of these beloved characters.” According to Stephen Schwartz, the award-winning songwriter of the Tony-winning Broadway show, Chu is right.

There’s one huge reason that “Wicked” really needed to sprawl across two movies, in the words of Broadway’s Stephen Schwartz … and it all comes down to a little ditty called “Defying Gravity.” Yes, the song that closes Act 1 of “Wicked” and convinced musical theater kids the world over that they too could belt like Cynthia Erivo or Broadway’s original Elphaba Idina Menzel, is just too epic to simply happen halfway through the movie, as Schwartz revealed in June 2022.

“We found it very difficult to get past ‘Defying Gravity’ without a break,” Schwartz explained in a newsletter honoring him known as “The Schwartz Scene” (via Variety.) “That song is written specifically to bring a curtain down, and whatever scene to follow it without a break just seemed hugely anti-climactic.” 

Not only that, but Schwartz said that he and Chu, along with the rest of the film’s creative team, tried to contain “Wicked” into just one movie and simply couldn’t figure out how to make it work. “The truth is we tried for some time to make it one movie, even if it had to be one very long movie,” Schwartz revealed in a statement. “But we kept running into two problems. The first is that even as a very long single movie, it required us cutting or omitting things that we wanted to include and that we think fans of the show and the story will appreciate.” Add in the “Defying Gravity” of it all, and this decision does, ultimately, make sense.

“Wicked: Part One” is available to rent or buy on digital streaming platforms now, and the retitled “Wicked: For Good” hits theaters on November 21, 2025.