In what could have been a major upset in the world of big-budget fantasy properties that start with Wi-, Wicked director Jon M. Chu revealed this week that he initially shot down plans for his adaptation of the hit Broadway musical in favor of directing the Willow TV reboot pilot. In fact, as keen observers of the Willow-verse probably know, Chu actually signed on to for the sequel series to Ron Howard’s exploration of the power of magical fingers first, before stepping away from the project in 2021, stating scheduling and personal reasons. A few months later, he announced that he was working on Wicked, the first half of which arrives in theaters on November 22.
From an outside point of view, you might think that this was a straight-up instance of Wi-based ditching, but Chu makes it clear in a new profile this week that that wasn’t what happened: In fact, he was so committed to Willow—he’s a big fan of the franchise, and even named one of his kids after the movie—that he outright rejected Wicked when it was first brought to him, because he didn’t want to let Lucasfilm and its various Gelflings in residence down. He didn’t walk away from the project until it was time to move to Wales and actually make the thing, at which point his wife suggested to him that, actually, moving to Wales with multiple kids in the immediate aftermath of the COVID lockdowns might be, y’know, a lot. “Months later,” Chu told THR, “As we’re about to go to Wales to shoot Willow, omicron came around, and my wife was going to have another baby, and we had gone through so much during COVID. My wife turned to me and said, ‘Moving our whole family to Wales at this moment, during this rise of something that we don’t know, it’s too much for us.’ That broke my heart. I walked away from that.” (The Willow show ended up running for a single season on Disney+, which now doesn’t even bother to stream the result.)
In fact, Chu says he thought he’d actually lost both projects, noting that he’d been told Wicked wouldn’t wait around for him. As it turns out, though, producers hadn’t found anybody else to helm their massively budgeted musical, and so Chu still got to go do things like ask forgiveness, not permission, on the subject of planting 9 million tulips for some of the films’ big landscape scenes. (The studio told him to use CGI. Chu: “They got a little mad at us, but that was the rebelliousness we were in. We’re like, ‘We’re making Oz! You don’t cheap Oz out!'”) Wicked got its world premiere back at the end of October, where it got strong critical reception; of course, the same could be said for Chu’s last big-budget musical, In The Heights, which then promptly sank at the box office. It remains to be seen whether the new movie will follow a similar trajectory, or if it’ll wind up, uh, resisting the pull of the Earth’s collective mass? Contesting one of the fundamental interactions of physics? Going up to sky land instead of down to the dirt place? Feels like there should be a phrase for this.
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