On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Variety’s Rebecca Rubin unpacks Universal Pictures’ risky decision to break “Wicked” in two parts, and how it paid off with a record haul. And Jennifer Maas gives us an update on the mood at HBO as parent company Warner Bros. Discovery slides into sale mode yet again.
Rubin explains that with a $150 million opening, “Wicked: For Good” was by definition a four-quadrant hit. “When you get to these numbers — $150 million domestically and over $200 million globally — it is resonating mostly everywhere. But what stood out to me was the two parts of it all. A few years ago when Universal announced that they were going to split wicked into two parts, a lot of people, myself included, were very skeptical about what that decision would look like, because it’s already risky to split a movie into two. And musicals are a very polarizing genre,” Rubin says. “And so it was a huge gamble on Universal’s part to not just need one big-budget musical to succeed, but two to succeed a year apart. It’s very encouraging now to see that at least financially speaking it feels like that decision has paid off because they have another huge opening on their hands.”
More to come