Spoilers ahead for Wicked , the Broadway musical, film adaptation, and original novel. If somehow you’ve remained unaware that the movie version of Wicked tells only half a story, you’re forgiven — the trailers have done a decent job of hiding that the film ends with a cliffhanger. The two-hour-and-40-minute film is an adaptation of the first act of Wicked the stage musical, with Wicked: Part Two — based on the second act — hitting theaters November 21, 2025.
That may qualify the next 12 months as the longest intermission in history. Not since the conclusion of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 have audiences been left in such suspense. To its credit, Wicked manages to feel like a complete movie, even with so much story left to be told.
And we’re not exactly in the dark about what’s coming next, thanks to the long-running Broadway musical and Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West , on which the show is based. To help you get through the long year ahead, we’ve broken down the ending of the first movie, and what you can expect to see in the next one. In the song “The Wizard and I,” Elphaba, played by Cynthia Erivo, lets us know that she’s been waiting to meet the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) since birth, but shortly after she and her roommate, Glinda, played by Ariana Grande, arrive in the Emerald City, they discover that he’s just a guy.
The Wizard and Shiz University.