Musicals Aren’t Dead, Even In Two Parts: Jon M. Chu’s “Obvious” Decision Has ‘Wicked’ Opening To $120M, A Record For Broadway-To-Screen Pic – Crew Call Podcast
deadline.comIt’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 Potter, 2010 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 proved 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.
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