Splitting Wicked into two movies was the first conversation director Jon M. Chu had
Before people could really hold space with the lyrics of "Defying Gravity," Jon M. Chu had to figure out how much space his Wicked adaptation was going to take up in general. "The first question was: one movie or two?" he shared in a recent interview with The New York Times. This was something Chu was committed to figuring out right from the jump, not something he was forced to confront through bloat or rewrites that expanded the material into a place untenable for just one film. Apparently, one of the six early drafts he received would have resulted in a movie that was about five hours long; not even Martin Scorsese would attempt something like that.
"I told them, we can’t debate about this every meeting, so let’s make a decision and commit. If we want to change it later, that’s fine," he continued. "When you come in as the director, there’s like a two-week honeymoon period… You get to set some boundaries."
From a 2022 newsletter by Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz, it sounds like the team did at least attempt to change their minds. "The truth is we tried for some time to make it one movie… but we kept running into two problems," he wrote, via Variety. First, not making the five-hour version "required us cutting or omitting things that we wanted to include and that we think fans of the show and the story will appreciate." Second was the "Defying Gravity" problem. "That song is written specifically to bring a curtain down, and whatever scene to follow it without a break just seemed hugely anti-climactic," he said.
This was a controversial decision, of course—one that's been generating discussion for over two years now. Even today, the date of the film's long-awaited premiere, the choice has its detractors. "The time-killing sprawl is evident from the jump," Jesse Hassenger writes in his review of the film for The A.V. Club. "The movie opens not with a concise curtain-raising number, but a mish-mash of exposition, flashbacks, and the musical equivalent of throat-clearing."
Despite all the conversation, Chu is currently "living the theater kid’s dream." He also seems to stand fully behind his decision. "You have the greatest gift in the world, an ending number of ‘Defying Gravity,'" he recently told IndieWire. "It really dictated what we need to plant in the story in order to make ‘Defying Gravity’ the thing that we hope for [Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba]... When she finally sings ‘Defying Gravity,’ it feels like [what] we’ve been waiting for." Wicked is currently playing in theaters, so you can now decide for yourself.