Wicked’s Runtime Revealed! What Happened?!?!
A couple days back we got the revealed run time of the movie adaption of the Broadway play Wicked. I was shocked to see what I saw and I have some thoughts on it, so let’s talk about it!
The Runtime: 2 hours and 40 minutes
My Thoughts
- I was pretty shocked when I saw the revealed runtime of this movie and honestly, I don’t understand why it’s so long. Wicked is a movie adaption of the iconic Broadway production that’s being adapted into two parts, part one comes out in November, part two comes out next November. Essentially, it’s a prequel to The Wizard of Oz and explains who The Wicked Witch came to be who we saw in The Wizard of Oz. Honestly, I don’t understand why this movie is 2 hours and 40 minutes long. There’s been people complaining about movies being too long, they want more reasonable runtimes with movies. Then they announce that Wicked is 2 hours and 40 minutes long and I don’t get it.
- This is a PG family musical that’s releasing around Thanksgiving time. This should have been a great movie to take the entire family to go see around the holidays, but now with it being 2 hours and 40 minutes long it’s probably going to reduce the amount of families that actually want to go see this movie. The target audience for this movie is children and it’s very hard for them to sit through a movie of this run time. I thought this movie would be 1 hour 30 to 1 hour and 40 minutes long. That seemed like a good reasonable runtime for this movie. But it’s an hour longer than what it should have been. Prior to this information coming out, I was thinking this movie would be profitable. There’s a very large fanbase for this, Ariana Grande is one of the most popular pop singers of my generation. The movie cost $145 million, it needs to make about 2.5 to 3 times its budget to be profitable. It needs to make between $360 and $440 million to be profitable, originally I thought that was on the table. Now, this movie might struggle to make a profit. A PG family movie aimed for children being nearly 3 hours long, I don’t know many families are wanting to make an adventure out to the theater. Especially when a week later we’re getting Moana 2 that’s probably going to have a much more reasonable runtime that’s better to take the entire family to go see. I would not be surprised if this movie either disappoints or bombs at the box office.
- The weirdest thing about it all, the Broadway production of this is 2 hours and 45 minutes. On Broadway they were able to tell this entire story in 2 hours and 45 minutes. Part one of the movie adaptation is pretty much that exact length, I don’t get it. I’m not sure how long part two is going to be, but these two movie adaptations could be close to five hours long when you put them together. It feels like they’re splitting this movie into two parts just so they can print money and that feels very cynical and the studio is just trying to milk the product. That’s one of the problems that people had when they were adapting books into movies. In the 2010s, they took the last books of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Twilight and split them into two parts. The common criticism to all of the movies is that part one feels dragged out and all set up. And part two is better, maybe that’ll be the similar situation here with these two movies. I feel like the pacing of part one is going to be very weird, I wouldn’t be surprised if the biggest flaw of the movie is that it was too long and they could have trimmed an hour from this movie and it would have been better.
- Anyway, I didn’t expect to have a big reaction to the revealed runtime of Wicked. This wasn’t a movie that I was excited for, I’ve never seen the Broadway production, I’ve actually never seen The Wizard of Oz. None of the trailers have really worked for me, I never really had plans to go see this movie. Now seeing the runtime, the reviews are going to have to convince me big time that this movie is worth my time and that I should go see it.
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