There are two
rather important things that Universal's not making clear in the promotional materials for this movie so far.
- That it is a full-on musical - in the Super Bowl spot and now the extra-length theatrical trailer released this week, you hear some singing and see a bit of dancing, but you don't actually see the characters singing. This has been standard-issue advertising for most non-biographical musical films in the last 20 years or so, most recently with Wonka and the musical versions of The Color Purple and Mean Girls* -- but it still cheeses off some viewers who go to the theater and complain that they "didn't know people would be singing". Maybe it's because theater in general doesn't have the reach it used to, but not everybody who hears about this Wicked movie is going to know right away that this is an adaptation of a stage musical.
- That it is the first half of a two-part adaptation, ala the recent Dune films, with the second part to be released in 2025. (In fact the actual title is Wicked Part One. Part Two was shot at the same time, so it's all set to go.) Notice that the extra-length trailer shows little beyond Elphaba fleeing the Emerald City via broomstick, because that's the ending of Act One of the show and thus this film. They're stretching out the material with new characters, songs, and some backstory material lifted from Gregory Maguire's source novel. If this isn't made clearer by the point of release, this again could upset casual viewers when the movie ends on a massive cliffhanger.
*Basically, there's an assumption that there's a huge swath of potential viewers who cannot abide musicals. And to be fair, the last two movie musicals I can think of offhand that made it abundantly clear in the ads that they were musicals were
Cats and
Wish, and honesty was not the best policy in those cases.
