How Wicked Felled Gladiator II at the Box Office
To use the topically appropriate set of metaphors: Wicked cast a spell on North American audiences over its opening weekend in theaters, pulling in $114 million to wipe the Colosseum floor with Gladiator II. The swords-and-sandals sequel to Ridley Scott’s Best Picture–winning Gladiator (2000) took in $55.5 million domestically — a mighty haul for quarter-century-old intellectual property (which has amassed $220 million globally to date and cost $250 million to produce). It also represents a kind of return to pre-COVID moviegoing days, arriving at the end of a year in which ticket sales are still down nearly 30 percent from where they were in 2019.
Viewed more narrowly, though, the pre-Thanksgiving box-office showdown alternately known as “Glicked” and “Wickiator” hewed closely to an event movie synergy first seen during the summer of 2023 with Barbenheimer. Then as now, an annoying if slightly amusing portmanteau conjoining the films’ names hyped up prerelease awareness, helping to drive ticket sales. The Margot Robbie–starring Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer hit multiplexes on the same day, each acting as a promotional force multiplier for the other. And viewers cohered along rigid gender lines. Cut to this weekend: A full three-quarters of the audience turning out for Wicked — part one of Universal’s phantasmagorical adaptation of the long-running, multibillion-dollar-grossing Wizard of Oz prequel/Broadway musical — were women. While men turned out in force for Gladiator’s R-rated shark-and-rhino-combat carnage.
“In both cases, the female movie is the winner,” notes David Herrin, founder of the film-tracking-and-data-analytics firm Quorum. “And the female movie makes twice as much as the male-skewing movie; Barbie did $160 million, and Oppenheimer did $80 million.”
Despite the $145 million frenemy-witch coming-of-age musical’s lopsided victory, it was hardly a foregone conclusion that Wicked would crush Gladiator II under its ruby-slippered heel. The movies were not even scheduled to go head-to-head until July, when Universal decided to move Wicked’s release up by five days so as not to directly compete with Disney’s animated blockbuster-in-the-making Moana 2 (which hits theaters this week and which prerelease “tracking” surveys indicated would have cannibalized Wicked’s female and family ticket tallies). Moreover, Hollywood has a piss-poor track record of allocating money and marketing resources to female-forward movies. And first-look materials unveiled at Las Vegas’s Cinemacon in April effectively anointed Gladiator II as fall’s must-see movie: a stirring spectacle of man-eating monkeys, Denzel Washington speechifying and inner-Colosseum boat warfare, all but certain to become an awards-season front-runner. “Not only does Paramount have a Thanksgiving tentpole locked up here in the sequel to the 2000 Oscar-winning Best Picture,” Deadline gushed coming out of the convention, “but — wow — they clearly have another awards contender on their hands.”
More potentially detrimental to Wicked’s box-office primacy: A string of “Part 1” movies had either fizzled or underperformed at the box office. Among them: 2015’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 (which did not lose money but fell well short of the cultural saturation of earlier Hunger Games installments), Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (which posted a $552.4 cumulative gross on a $291 million budget, essentially breaking even when you factor in prints and advertising costs), The Exorcist: Believer (director David Gordon Green’s debut installment of a planned trilogy whose $136.2 million box office haul reportedly “disappointed” its distributor, Universal, and production company, Blumhouse) ,and Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (which star-director-writer-producer Kevin Costner partially self-financed; it grossed $38 million on a $100 million budget to qualify as a gigantic flop). While Wicked contains nary a titular mention of being a part one, its target audience widely expected the two-hour-and-45-minute movie’s story line to carry through Act I of the Tony-winning musical (Part 2 is due in theaters just before next Thanksgiving).
So then how did the Ariana Grande–Cynthia Erivo musical two-hander fell Gladiator II in the arena while delivering the biggest-ever opening — both domestically and internationally — for a movie based on a Broadway show? How did Scott’s Roman combat epic lose its early advantage? “I think it’s Wicked catching fire more than Gladiator II coming apart,” says movie analyst David A. Gross, who publishes the industry newsletter FranchiseRe. “Wicked is doing everything right and the campaign is taking on its own energy.”
Toward that end, Universal — making its biggest up-front investment in a movie project to date with parts one and two costing around $500 million to produce and promote — helped turn Wicked into an event with more than 400 corporate partners and innumerable branded tie-ins. (Standouts include Build-a-Bear Workshops’ Teddy Bear Elphaba Gift Set, the Beis Carry-on Roller suitcase in Wicked Pink, Tubbz First Edition Wicked Glinda Upland Cosplaying Rubber Duck Vinyl Figure, and the Great Value Wicked Color Macaroni and Cheese Cup.) During its broadcasts this summer of the Paris Olympic games, the studio’s corporate sibling NBC showcased an avalanche of Wicked promo content such as Erivo and Grande showing up at the opening ceremony arm in arm, attired, respectively, in Elphaba green and Glinda pink, paling around in the stands at events together, and posing cinematically in front of the Eiffel Tower. The Today show provided its own wall-to-wall Wicked coverage (interviewing supporting cast members like Bowen Yang and Ethan Slater; providing a primer on “sing-along etiquette”). And over the past year, Grande and Erivo’s brand-ambassadorship for the film has taken them from the Oscars (as presenters for Best Song and Score) in March to the Met Gala ball in May, in addition to a series of premieres for Wicked on both U.S. coasts and in Sydney, London, and Mexico City.
“The scale and scope of this campaign has been enormous,” says Herrin. “I think [Universal’s] strategy is Let’s throw as much money into it as we think we need and then let’s throw a little more on top.” Exhibit A: Earlier this month, the studio arranged for Paris’s Arc de Triomphe to be illuminated in the movie’s signature pink and green hues.
If Hollywood has learned anything from Barbenheimer, it’s that megabudget event movies from rival studios can vie for multiplex market share without becoming natural enemies. As the industry observers I talked to see it, Glicked’s competition — with both movies effectively winning at the box office and second place functioning as its own kind of home run — can only be good for business, insofar as it gets moviegoers back into the habit of sharing communal space in darkened auditoriums after an uninspiring run of films in October and early November. “Two strong films are jolting a box office that fell apart after a good summer,” Gross says. “With the addition of Moana 2 next weekend, Thanksgiving should break records. It’s all good news and overdue for the industry.”
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