Universal’s Wicked: For Good, the sequel to its two-time Oscar-winning Wicked, is looking to deliver a miracle that exhibitors will be thankful for with a similar opening to last year’s first chapter in the $112 million-$115 million range. Wicked: For Good opens on November 21.
The Jon M. Chu-directed Wicked opened to $112.5M in the weekend before Thanksgiving last year and together with Paramount’s Gladiator 2 and Disney’s Moana 2 delivered an unprecedented $420M for the Wednesday-Sunday Thanksgiving stretch. Disney’s Zootopia 2, which opens November 26, doesn’t emerge on tracking until next week, so we’ll update you then on that animated sequel’s outlook.
Wicked: For Good like its predecessor is over-the-top with women: Wicked pulled in 72% and a massive 80% definite recommend on Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak. First choice with women over and under 25 is ahead of Wicked, and it’s also way ahead of Lilo & Stitch, which opened to $146M. Unaided awareness for the sequel, the survey category by which pollsters cite a movie they want to see without being prompted, is spot-on with the original movie.
No magic was needed for Wicked: moviegoers easily gave it an A CinemaScore. The first movie clocked in at 2 hours and 40 minutes; the sequel is shorter at 2 hours and 18 minutes. Wicked holds records in both its opening and cume as the biggest movie ever at the box office for a feature adaptation of a Broadway musical; the pic finaled at $473.2M stateside and $756.4M global.
Absent on the weekend before Thanksgiving is a mega-event R-rated tentpole ala Gladiator 2 last year, which in the shadow of Wicked opened to $55M and went on to gross $172.4M domestic and $462.1M global. Filling the gap this year, but on the previous weekend (November 14-16) is Paramount’s Running Man and Lionsgate’s Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. Running Man is best with men and ahead of Mickey 17 ($19M), while Now You See Me 3 is looking to be a four-quad movie, though women are more prominent in first choice. Running Man was originally set to hit theaters November 21 but then moved to get access to Imax, ultimately settling on November 14. Now You See Me 3 will have access to PLFs including Dolby and 4DX.
Going wide against Wicked: For Good and playing to hardcore genre fans is Sony’s Sisu: Road to Revenge. The first Sisu, a WWII genre movie distributed by Lionsgate in 2022, was a microbudget play with a $3.3M opening and $7.3M take. The outlook is that part 2 will improve upon on the original with potentially a two-time better opening. In the second film, written and directed by Jalmari Helander, a man returns to dismantle his family’s house where they were murdered in war, with plans to rebuild it elsewhere. When the killer, a Red Army commander, tracks him down, a brutal cross-country pursuit begins.
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