John M. Chu’s 2024 movie Wicked broke box-office records, and the second half of the story it started, Wicked: For Good, is on track to follow suit. For that matter, the Broadway musical these movies are adapting broke plenty of records of its own, and still stands as the second-biggest Broadway musical of all time. This kind of financial success always gets producers scheming: Could there be a Wicked 3? And if so, how would they pull it off?
Even though Wicked: For Good wraps up the story of the Broadway musical, a sequel isn’t entirely out of the question from a material standpoint. The Broadway show, largely about the tangled friendship and enmity between eventual Wicked Witch Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and eventual Oz leader Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande), is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. That book has three sequels, as well as a full spin-off series that follows Elphaba’s granddaughter.
The first two sequels primarily focus on other characters: Liir (the son of Elphaba and her lover Fiyero) and the Cowardly Lion. But 2011’s Out of Oz brings Glinda and the magical book the Grimmerie back to the center of the story, as Oz faces civil war. It’s also the first of the books to heavily imply that Elphaba secretly survived the end of Wicked. A direct sequel that brought back Erivo and Grande in these roles would almost certainly draw on that book, and on what happens to Oz after the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) departs in a balloon, as he does in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.`
The Broadway musical brings a lot of sweeping changes to Maguire’s Wicked, and Chu’s movie versions alter and expand the story further, including adding new songs from original Wicked songwriter Stephen Schwartz. In any form, Wicked 3 would already be diverging fairly far from the source material just to sync up with the previous changes — but it’s still possible to draw on Maguire’s books for a continuation of this storyline.
That said, the real issue is whether the creators would be interested in working on another Wicked sequel. Speaking to Variety, Chu gently deferred the question: “You know, there’s a lot of ideas flying around right now. […] We’ll see. Let’s enjoy this ride first.”
But he’s also been quoted as leaving the option open, depending on Wicked: For Good’s box office: “You never know. People want that, but they have to see movie two first. Maybe the audience could tell us.”
Schwartz says he and Winnie Holzman, who wrote the book for the Wicked Broadway show and co-wrote the two movie screenplays, are currently working on a new Wicked project he describes as “not a sequel, but an adjunct.” Which could mean another side-character’s story going on during the action of Wicked and Wicked: For Good, or a prequel, or something else entirely.
But in terms of a direct sequel, he said, “I’m just not sure that that right idea exists […] If someone could think of a continuation of the story that seemed to have a justification beyond simply making money, of course. As far as right now, no one has yet presented an idea that I’ve heard that would justify such a thing.”
Wicked: For Good is in theaters now.
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