Wicked

Some of the longest movies of all time include the 2012 experimental movie Logistics , which runs for 857 hours, and Gérard Courant’s Cinématon , with a run-time of more than 150 hours. But even more mainstream movies in recent years have raised eyebrows for their more-than-three-hour run-times, with last year’s three-hour-and-35-minute-long Oscar winner The Brutalist even including a 15-minute intermission. In 2022, James Cameron defended the length of the second Avatar film, The Way of Water , against those who deemed it to be too long, and he recently said that his upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash , due out in December, would be even longer. (The final run-time, though, for the third Avatar film puts it at the same length as The Way of Water .) Some projects have also been split in two, with filmmakers defending that decision as necessary to tell a complete story, but that’s caused the full running times for these tales to span nearly five hours. One project that was cut into two movies was Wicked . After the first movie was released in November 2024, the second movie titled Wicked: For Good is coming out in November 2025. Even before the movies were released, director Jon M. Chu explained he wanted to tell the story in two parts to stay true to the source material of the Broadway show. In a statement shared via X , Chu said that “all of the cast and crew” promised “to create nothing less than an experience that honors its foundation for all the fans who’ve waited for this movie, and to offer a thrilling, fantastical world full of dynamic characters that invites in those who are unfamiliar.” Wicked is not the only film to make headlines for its length. The Hollywood Reporter breaks down 10 movies that casts and crews have felt the need to defend the lengths of. In order to stay true to the Broadway musical, the Wicked film adaptation was released in two parts. The first part, simply titled Wicked , was released in November 2024 and has a run-time of two hours and 40 minutes. Part two, titled Wicked: For Good , released one year later in November 2025 and has a run-time of two hours and 17 minutes. Together, that gives the full Wicked tale a running time of nearly five hours, with the first film running even longer than the Broadway musical’s two-hour-and-a-half run-time. Indeed, a number of reviews of the first film deemed it too long. Chu also promised to bring more depth to the characters, which he believed was only possible by turning the story into two films. The second Avatar movie, titled Avatar: The Way of Water , was released in December 2022 and has a runtime of three hours and 12 minutes. While the sequel was about 30 minutes longer than the first Avatar movie, director James Cameron explained to Total Film magazine that he felt The Way of Water had to be longer due the second film’s increased focus on the “relationship” and “emotion” compared to the 2009 movie. Meanwhile, Cameron told Empire magazine in July 2022 that he didn’t care about complaints regarding the long run-time . “I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” he said. “I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a fucking break. I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s OK to get up and go pee.” Cameron’s third movie in the Avatar franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash, set to hit theaters on Dec. 19, will be just as long as the second movie with a run-time of three hours and 12 minutes. But the director previously proclaimed that it would be even longer than The Way of Water and the longest film in the franchise. Amanda Silver, who co-wrote the script for Fire and Ash alongside Cameron and Rick Jaffa, also told the outlet that the second and third movies had to be separate films because “the characters needed to breathe.” “These movies are a lo

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with Wicked , Universal’s blockbuster musical movie from director Jon M. Chu. Adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West — about the untold stories of the witches of Oz, set in the years before Dorothy dropped in via L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — the screenplay was penned by original Broadway musical book writer Winnie Holzman and Cruella co-scribe Dana Fox . In 2003, Wicked debuted on Broadway, starring Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, earning 10 Tony nominations including Best Musical and three wins. The musical has earned about $6 billion worldwide and has become a runaway success in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia and the UK. The two meet as students at Shiz University in the fantastical Land of Oz and forge an unlikely but profound friendship. Following an encounter with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, their friendship reaches a crossroads and their lives take very different paths. Their extraordinary adventures in Oz will ultimately see them fulfill their destinies as Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West. On the surface, Wicked is the origin story of how Elphaba became the Wicked Witch and Galinda became Glinda the Good. But underneath is a story that swims in darker waters and mines deeper truths. Wicked is also a show about the quiet, insidious rise of a fascist movement that seeks to demonize the intelligent, speaking Animals of Oz, blame them for everything wrong in society, and destroy them by (literally) taking away their voices. The film also stars Michelle Yeoh as Shiz University’s headmistress Madame Morrible; Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero; Ethan Slater as Boq; Marissa Bode in her feature-film debut as Nessarose, Elphaba’s favored sister; and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard. To bring the musical to the big screen, producer Marc Platt reunited with Holzman and original composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz. “For years, Winnie and I would say, ‘For the movie, we should do this…’,” Schwartz says. “It’s been exciting us for a long time. The story of Wicked — as brilliantly imagined by Gregory Maguire and then as realized by Winnie and myself and our show collaborators — has spoken to people who have made it their own. Each of our characters is keeping a secret from the world — sometimes even a secret from themselves. That’s what the show is about: revealing what’s under the surface.” This film adaptation, Holzman says, “was an incredible opportunity for Stephen and I to revisit this world. Coming back into it, we realized that there were aspects of the story that we wanted to explore more deeply, and with more nuance. When we got the go-ahead for two films, we knew we’d have the ability to keep everything we wanted to keep, and still expand certain key moments. We are telling the same story, while allowing it to blossom into something new.” That story came along with help from Fox, who co-wrote Disney’s Cruella with Emma Stone, The Lost City with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, as well as the rom-coms What Happens in Vegas and The Wedding Date. She’s next up writing a global heist comedy she conceived with Simon Kinberg, that will star Ryan Reynolds; Netflix just picked it up in a seven-figure deal beating out eight bidders. Very interesting stuff in there that did not make it to the screen as well as some ad-libbed lines Ariana Grande added in on set being absent here. Maybe there will be a director’s cut with the deleted material added back in eventually. Your data can be used to monitor for and prevent unusual and possibly fraudulent activity (for example, regarding advertising, ad clicks by bots), and ensure systems and processes work properly and securely. It can also be used to correct any problems you, the publisher or the advertiser may encounter in the delivery of content and ads and in your