Behold!! the first trailer for the movie musical Wicked: Part One debuted on Sunday, showing the first footage of Cynthia Erivo as the witchy Elphaba and Ariana Grande as bubbly Glinda.
Directed by Jon M. Chu, who also obtained In the Heights from stage to screen in 2021, Wicked will be a two-part adaptation of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Tony-winning Broadway show. While Part Two is set to be out on November 26, 2025.
A prequel to the events of The Wizard of Oz, Wicked is the origin story of “a green-skinned woman,” the film’s logline states, who “becomes the Wicked Witch of the West.” Its source material is Gregory Maguire’s hit 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Joining Erivo, 37, as that green-skinned heroine and Grande, 30, as her schoolmate-turned-best-friend is Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard, Marissa Bode as Nessarose, Bowen Yang as Pfannee, Keala Settle as Miss Coddle, Ethan Slater as Boq, and Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible.
“This movie has everything: giant musical numbers, big action pieces,” Chu told the audience at CinemaCon 2023 in April, introducing first-look footage. “And using a classic story you all know, The Wizard of Oz.”
The director added:
At the end of the day, it’s actually not about those things. It’s about change and [how] it’s necessary for things to get better.
The musical’s original Broadway cast included Kristin Chenoweth as Glinda and Idina Menzel as Elphaba. The latter actress earned one of the production’s three Tony Awards, for leading actress in a musical.
Celebrating Wicked‘s 15th anniversary in 2018, Menzel told PEOPLE she “had no idea what it would become but I knew it was something special. I needed this role to teach me something about life that I needed to learn.”
Chenoweth said:
Very few times in our career do we have a hand-in-glove moment, and Glinda was mine. I just thought when I read it, ‘This is my part! And if anybody else plays Glinda, I’ll kill them in their sleep!’
In 2022 around the time it was filming, Erivo told Entertainment Tonight that the Wicked film adaptation would be “unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.”
She continued, “I think we’re going to enjoy the magic of it. We’re going to try and put our own spin on what we know already and show you a story about two women [who] are sisters.”
Wicked: Part One is in theaters Nov. 27.
