Principal photography for the Wicked movie is well underway—as each Instagram photo of Ariana Grande’s blonde Glinda hair reminds us. So while the feelings among fans of the blockbuster Broadway musical of the same name the movie is based on continue to be mixed—about casting choices especially—it seems like things are moving smoothly after the heaps of developmental and COVID-related delays that the production first experienced.
Things are moving along so smoothly that we’ve now finally got a first look at the movie’s main characters via a two-picture post from director Jon M. Chu’s Instagram and Twitter. One image features Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba—her face turned away from the camera but very much recognizable with her green skin and iconic costume—seeming getting ready to jump on a broom and fly away. One could say she’s about to defy gravity if you get what I mean.
The other photo is Ariana Grande’s Glinda, clad in her signature pink gown, climbing up some massive stairs. It would be nice to see more but both pictures are on the “not-so-brightly-lit” side, so much so that Glinda’s blonde hair is barely visible, choosing instead to focus on her (relatively) bright pink dress.
Fans have immediately poked fun at the fact you can’t really see much from these two images, asking Chu in the comments of the post to “turn up the brightness like a little.” A thing that he in fact did, posting a second set of slightly brighter pictures. Then again, as he himself noted in the comments, this is just the very first look. Maybe they’re meant to be this way as a way to pique our curiosity—we’ll have to wait for the movie to see if it actually falls within the Hollywood trend of refusing to actually light its sets and actors.
Chu’s post also revealed the official release date—Wicked will hit cinemas on November 27, 2024. That’s just the first part, though, since Chu had already announced in April of 2022 that the story was going to be split in two.
“As we prepared this production over the last year, it became increasingly clear that it would be impossible to wrestle the story of Wicked into a single film without doing some real damage to it,” it reads in the announcement Chu posted on Twitter. “So we decided to give ourselves a bigger canvas and make not just one Wicked movie but two!!!! With more space, we can tell the story of Wicked as it was meant to be told while bringing even more depth and surprise to the journeys of these beloved characters”.
The sequel is set to premiere around a year after the first part, so we can expect it sometime in the autumn of 2025.
(image: Universal Stage Productions)
