‘Wicked’ Recap: All About Oz
“Wicked: For Good” is finally here. Part 1 of “Wicked” ends here.
Cinemas couldn’t be happier as the new Wicked brings magic to the box office in 2025.
“Wicked: For Good,” the second installment of the two-part film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, opened this weekend to a whopping $150 million in North America, according to estimates from ComScore.
This box office gross surpassed the $112.5 million domestic opening of the original film Wicked, and set a new record for the biggest weekend opening ever for a film based on a Broadway production. This record was previously held by the original Wicked.
Wicked: For Good also had the second-highest opening weekend of the year in North America. That was slightly below “The Minecraft Movie,” which opened in April with $162.7 million, but ahead of “Lilo & Stitch,” which made $146 million in its first three days of release. Disney’s live-action remake opened in theaters over the Memorial Day long weekend and grossed $182.6 million, including Monday’s box office.
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande will reprise their Oscar-nominated roles of Elphaba and Glinda, respectively, in “For Good.” The production begins the second act of the Broadway show and concludes the characters’ stories while tying in with the events of “The Wizard of Oz.”
“For Good” had more generally mixed reviews among critics than the first “Wicked,” but audience reaction seems to be on par with the original. In a poll of movie fans conducted by CinemaScore, “Wicked: For Good” received an average rating of A, the same rating as 2024’s “Wicked.”
The film’s success gave movie theaters the blockbuster they had been waiting for after a fairly quiet fall movie season. In recent months, several titles have performed worse than expected, from the Bruce Springsteen biopic “Springsteen: Deliveringists from Nowhere” to Disney’s latest “Tron” sequel “Tron: Ares.”
Before “For Good,” the last movie to gross more than $100 million at the North American box office was “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” released in July.
But movie theaters won’t have to wait long for another blockbuster. The sequel to the animated blockbuster “Zootopia” is scheduled to be released on Thanksgiving weekend, Nov. 26, nearly 10 years after the original Disney film grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. Soon after, Avatar: Fire and Ash, the long-awaited second sequel to James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, which became the highest-grossing film of all time, will be released.
While a direct sequel to Wicked is not expected, the cast may still have one last chance to bid farewell to the two films at the 2026 Oscars. The first “Wicked” received 10 nominations at the Academy Awards, and “For Good” could surpass that number as it includes two new original songs that will be considered for awards.
