The following contains SPOILERS for Wicked Part One, as well as the stage musical that it is based on.
When a movie studio discovers something that works, you can be sure that other movie studios will follow suit. Back in 2010, the last book in the Harry Potter series was turned into not one movie, but two, and it seems like since then as many major blockbusters can justify having split their story in half. This largely appears to be a financial decision, not a creative one, as two movies can make more money than one. The latest film to follow suit with this strategy is Wicked, a film based on a musical that has a break of only a few minutes but will see a break on the big screen for a full year.
A lot of fans of Wicked have questioned this decision. The musical works just fine on stage. Everybody in the theater watches the whole thing at once in the same length of time it takes to watch a long movie, so why turn it into two movies? I'm really not a fan of this trend but after seeing Wicked Part One, I have to admit that splitting Wicked in half actually makes more sense than most of the movies that have gotten that treatment over the last couple of decades.
Splitting Movies Up Is Dumb And I Hate It
While the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movies were largely responsible for so many movies splitting themselves in half, it really started earlier. Any film that saw multiple movies filmed simultaneously essentially split one story across two films. The second and third movies in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, as well as the second and third movies in the Matrix franchise, are essentially two halves of one story, even if the words “part one” and “part two” are not anywhere in their titles.
I hate this. A movie should, by its very nature, tell a complete story. A television series can break a story up into an episodic format, and that's fine. But one of the things that separates what a movie is from what a television series is, is that the story is complete.
That's not the case when it comes to all of these movies that get split in half. They almost all end with some sort of cliffhanger with dangling threads with parts of a story that need to be finished in the following movie. This is unavoidable considering in most cases the source material is not in two parts. Whether we're talking about Harry Potter book or Hunger Games, the novels were written as complete stories to be read straight through, but the movies are broken in half.
This has a detrimental effect on the stories. They aren't designed for this treatment, and as a result, the movies often don’t work on their own.
That's not to say these movies can't be good. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse is an excellent film, and one of my favorites that I've seen in the last couple of years. Ultimately though, it isn't a complete story. It’s difficult to truly judge the quality of half a film.
Maybe in some cases, the story was so big that it just couldn’t be contained in even a long movie runtime. But so often it’s clear this was done to simply make more money. Nobody will ever convince me that The Hobbit turned into a trilogy for any reason other than three movies make more money than two. The Hobbit could have been one movie. Maybe Wicked was split for that reason, but whatever the case, this time it works.
Wicked: Part One Is Actually A Complete Story
Wicked is actually significantly different than most of the stories that get cut in half. Wicked itself, i.e. the musical that the film is based on, has a natural breaking point. However, the thing that makes Wicked different than all the rest is that its first act is already a complete story.
I've seen Wicked as a stage musical but I suppose since the break between the two acts is only 15 minutes long, I hadn't noticed what I did when sitting down to watch Wicked: Part One in a theater. Elphaba has a complete character arc in the first act alone. We watch her grow and change and become the person that she is and all of that is done by the end of "Defying Gravity."
Act One is essentially a prequel to The Wizard of Oz and it works as that. If you were to watch Wicked Part One and then watch or read The Wizard of Oz without ever watching Act Two of Wicked, there's nothing necessarily missing. While there may be more to the story that is interesting and worth watching, it's not strictly necessary to enjoy the story that's been told. There are no dangling plot threads or incomplete character arcs. Everything a movie needs to do to tell a whole story is done here.
Back when every movie based on a book was splitting itself in two, we had the unfortunate case of the Divergent movies. Its final book was also split into two movies, but the first half bombed in theaters, and so the final movie was never made. As a result, we have an incomplete franchise; a story that will never be finished.
Wicked: Part Two is obviously a guarantee. It's basically done and is on the 2025 movie schedule. But if something absolutely wild happened, and the next movie was for some reason never released, it wouldn't make Part One any less enjoyable or unwatchable because the movie can stand on its own.
Wicked: Part Two Will Be A Sequel More Than A Second Half
The fact of the matter is that there's also a significant time jump that takes place between Act One and Act Two of Wicked. As a result, Act Two isn't so much the second half of one story as it is a new story. Wicked: Part Two will obviously be the sequel to Wicked: Part One, but that's exactly what Act Two of the stage musical really is. It's a sequel to what happened before, not a direct continuation.
I enjoyed Wicked: Part One, and so like any film that I enjoyed, I'm certainly willing to watch a sequel. But I'm looking forward to Wicked: Part Two in the same way that I'm looking forward to the next Avatar movie. Yes, there's more story to be told, but I'm not waiting for the previous story to be finished.
