Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo (born 8 January 1987) is an English actress, singer, and songwriter.
She is known for her performance as Celie in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, for which she won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, and the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Performance in a Daytime Program, the latter two she shared with the rest of the cast.
Erivo ventured into films in 2018, with roles in the heist film Widows and the thriller Bad Times at the El Royale. In 2019, she portrayed abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet, for which she earned nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Universal‘s massive musical tentpole bet Wicked originally was dated to go head-to-head with Disney Animation’s five-quad movie Moana 2 on Wednesday, November 27, the day before Thanksgiving, but will now go five days earlier on Friday, Nov.
22. A very smart release date change. Both movies are aimed at females. But Wicked counts a fanbase of a reported 30M people from around the globe who’ve seen the Stephen Schwartz stage show.
Not to mention, it’s the first of two parts — this movie has to work. Uni isn’t plotting a Horizon scenario here. The new earlier date puts it up against Paramount’s Gladiator II, creating potentially a Barbenheimer moment: One highly anticipated big movie aimed at dudes, the other at females.
There’s a lot of box office upside with both movies ahead of the Thanksgiving break, and, as we saw over the Barbenheimer weekend, moviegoers will watch both.
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