How Jon M. Chu Revived Musical Into Box Office Movie Hit

It’s a death-defying act to split one property into two movies.

Warner Bros did it with the greatest of ease on the final film adaptation of harry potter2010 and 2011’s Deathly Hallows, which combined grossed $2.3 billion worldwide. However, Lionsgate ran into a buzz saw and tried it with the final Divergent book, Allegiant, by Veronica Roth, which flopped so badly ($179.2 million), it never saw its final conclusion on the big screen.

Musicals have always provided a rags-or-riches genre at the box office, and when it came to the ambitious task of dividing up Wicked into two parts, director Jon M. Chu, says “it was also the most obvious thing to do because every time we tried to make it one movie, you had to rip out songs.”

“If we’re ending up on (the song) ‘Defying Gravity’, then we need to movie backwards from ‘Defying Gravity’,” the director says about breaking the musical into two.

That plan is already proving to be successful, with Wicked set to open to $120M at the domestic box office this weekend, shattering the record for a movie based on a Broadway show, flying way above the previous big opener, 2014’s Into the Woods ($31M opening).

Talk about die-hard fan of the original stage musical. Chu, the Crazy Rich Asians filmmaker, didn’t just catch the show on Broadway. He saw the musical workshopped when it was tuning up in San Francisco decades ago.

In taking the movie from stage to screen, he exposes that an “audience sits in a very different place in a theater than they do in a movie theater.”

During the pandemic lockdown, Chu huddled with Wicked stage and film producer Marc Platt, screenwriter Dana Fox and the original Wicked music and lyrics legend Stephen Schwartz and musical stage scribe Winnie Holzman. Together, “they walked me through every script they’ve ever made for this movie and the original show and every line why it was written that way, what scenes were cut out, why the lyrics are the way they are, what alternate lyrics that “were,” he said. “I got this theater kid dream of being able to understand.”

It was an awakening for Chu to delve into the source material’s mythology as there were story elements the stage show could get away with not explaining. However, the filmmaker knew he offered moviegoers a bigger explanation, as in, “What does it mean to defy gravity?” Does Elphaba power the broomstick or does it pull her?

And when he came to cutting darlings from the original stage show, Chu had a holy rule that guided him. “It’s the girls, stupid. That’s what people fell in love with. Yes, it’s Wizard of Oz and that means many things to many people. There’s a sort of political part of it. There’s a social part of a cultural side of it. But at the end of the day, it’s these girls. And so that’s what I really focused on.”

We also ask Chu about when we can expect the Crazy Rich Asians sequel. He says firmly, “I won’t bring everyone back unless it’s worth it,” I responded. “There’s too much on the line for everybody.”

You can listen to our Crew Call chat with Chu below: