Theaters flood with musical fanatics, all looking forward to seeing the legendary show Wicked brought to life on the big screen. As the film starts, audiences get excited to experience the story that continues to dominate Broadway’s ticket sales – the first half of it, at least. The title card reads “Wicked Part 1,” reminding audiences that they must buy more tickets next year to experience the full story.
A trend in filmmaking that has received an increase in discussion in recent years is the release of films that are written specifically for a sequel to be released later on. This has become controversial as the trend grows, as audiences both support and challenge the two-film structure.
Wicked Part 1 was released on Nov. 22 to acclaim from critics and fans alike; however, to experience the full story, audiences will need to wait until the release of Wicked Part 2, which is slated for release in just a year on Nov. 21, 2025. The quick release of the second part is made possible since the two features were filmed back to back, with the sequel currently in post-production. “Other scripts that were trying to fit it into one movie were stripping many songs and changing the story in ways that didn’t quite make logical, emotional sense… It became inevitable that we had to commit to two movies,” director Jon M. Chu said in an interview with Variety.
The musical’s two-act structure makes it easy to divide into two parts, one for each act. However, this leaves the first film’s story unresolved until the sequel’s release. “I guess it’s OK since it’s a musical with two acts,” sophomore Onyx Sanders said.
Like Wicked, the 2023 animated Spider-Man sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was originally written to be one long script. However, it was split into two parts, as the story was deemed too long to fit into one movie. “For a long time, we were trying to jam two movies into one, and then we realized the movie was telling us this was a whole complete arc of a story and this really was the second part of the trilogy, and so it just made a lot more sense then,” writer and producer Chris Miller said in an interview with IGN.
Since the script was split into two halves, the movie concludes with an abrupt cliffhanger ending, which quickly cuts to the credits before audiences are ready to part with the film. “It was sudden,” freshman Radin Razaghi said.
Unlike the quick follow-up of Wicked Part 2, audiences will need to wait for years for the next Spider-Verse film, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse to be released. The film was originally supposed to be released in March 2024 but has been delayed. As of November 2023, the team was still “breaking the story,” director Justin K. Thompson said in an interview with Above the Line.
Adaptations of dense subject matter such as Wicked and Dune market themselves without “Part One” in their titles. This exclusion leads audience members to expect to experience the whole story in the film, leaving them disappointed by the revelation that they only get to see half of it. “It’s bad marketing… marketing is what determines whether a movie succeeds or dies,” senior Kiarash Kashany said.
Rather than hide the two-part nature of the films, consumers propose that films play into the excitement of a story’s beginning in their marketing. “They need to make it seem like the cliffhanger is the biggest conflict in the story,” Kashany said.
