The new Wicked movie came out last weekend and had a decent opening weekend with $112,508,890 at the US and Canada box office. The gross worldwide is $178,288,025 making back money from the estimated $150,000,000 production cost.
Wicked is the first modern attempt to transition a Broadway musical into a movie or movies covering the same amount of time as the source material. Wicked is a two-part movie series that has a break between movies in the same place as the musical has its intermission. It also covers roughly the same amount of time with the movie’s runtime being 2 hours and 40 minutes.
I think that the film was well made, I enjoyed the different telling of a story that I enjoy. There were a few things that I would have done differently, but overall I think the movie was kept very faithful to the source material.
There have been a lot of reboots, sequels, and prequels that have been coming out in the past decade. Film companies want to make money and feel safer sticking with existing IPs and stories that have preexisting fanbases. The issue that most of these story continuations or retellings have is that they don’t respect the source material and tell their version of the story. A film version of a musical has a lot easier time with this because the musical comes with a screenplay and directions that translate well into a film.
I have some mixed feelings about this. I think that film retellings of musicals will be the next big film trend. I think that providing a way for more people to experience the stories and enjoy the characters is an admirable endeavor. At least to me musicals feel like an expense that most people cannot afford or want to spend their time on. Hopefully, those who are experiencing the story of Wicked for the first time through the film will want to see the musical themselves.
But the downside that I can see is that companies *cough* Disney *cough* will want to crank out as many reproductions as they can.
When a passion project like Wicked performs well, companies want to recreate that success. Unfortunately, that means that many of these reproductions will be headed by directors, producers, or writers who have no interest in the story they are responsible for telling. If every film had a director who was personally invested in respecting the source material as much as they are in their own stories, then we would see more faithful adaptations. Josh Cooley, director of Transformers One is a great recent example of this.
Overall I think that Wicked is a great movie and I will be seeing the second film. I’m interested to see how the rest of the film’s time in theaters goes, that should be a good indicator of how interested the film companies will be in making film adaptations of Broadway musicals.
Cianan’s Content 