Wicked: For Good director Jon M. Chu has revealed that the film’s characters were originally banned from saying “I love you” until an emotional rehearsal changed his mind.
The sequel to last year’s hit musical Wicked has been a box office smash, even exceeding the performance of the original film. The new film made $150 million from North American theaters in its first days in theaters, compared to the first installment’s $112 million.
Spoilers for Wicked: For Good follow
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Chu recalled that when they started making the follow-up he had decided: “Nobody says ‘love’ in Oz. That was a rule that we came into this movie with.”
However, the filmmaker relaxed that decree after witnessing an emotional rehearsal between stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.
Chu recalled that the pair improvised a key scene in which their characters are separated by a closet door.
“I just realized, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s the moment,’” says Chu. “[Musical number] ‘For Good’ is them being there for each other. But the closet is when they can act how they really feel. That door closes, it's like that moment that you say goodbye to someone, and you're home alone, and the silence, and you can now let it all out.”
Chu came to realize that by that point, the characters could utter the previously forbidden word authentically. “They can say ‘I love you’ because they've earned the right to say ‘I love you’,” he reflected.
He added that the success of the first Wicked film last year had given him “the freedom” to change his mind.
“We realized the audience is in and they want the characters to grow,” he said. “I knew I could fight off any note about catching anybody up about any plot. It’s not about the plot, ‘It’s about the girls, stupid,’ is what was repeated over and over.”
The runaway success of the new film has led studio Universal to consider expanding the film as a new franchise.
“Because of Wicked’s success but also the fanship, we have almost a responsibility to figure out how we can continue in this universe,” said Michael Moses, chief marketing officer for Universal. “Have we figured it out yet? No. But there are things underway.”
Despite its commercial success, Wicked: For Good received mixed reviews from film critics.
In a two-star write-up, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote: ‘If your complaint about last year’s Wicked was that it was so oddly lit that you could barely see what was going on, then fear not – in Wicked: For Good, you won’t mind so much, because there’s so little to look at.”
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