'Wicked: For Good'

Source: Universal

‘Wicked: For Good’

Wicked: For Good, Jon M. Chu’s concluding part of Universal’s Broadway show adaptation, obliterated the competition as it opened top on an estimated $150m from 4,115 locations to deliver the second highest North American opening weekend of 2025 behind A Minecraft Movie.

This was way ahead of Wicked’s $112.2m opening weekend almost exactly a year ago, and the new film’s $226m global bow boosts the franchise’s box office to $984m. It will cross the $1bn target within days, heading into the North American Thanksgiving holiday week.

Wicked: For Good earned an A CinemaScore rating and Universal executives said the $150m gross delivered the biggest opening weekend for a Broadway adaptation, ahead of 2024’s Wicked; the second highest opening weekend for a Universal Pictures film behind 2015’s Jurassic World; the second highest-opening weekend prior to Thanksgiving behind The Hunger Games: Catching Fire; and the third highest-grossing opening weekend for a musical of all time behind 2019’s The Lion King and 2017’s Beauty And The Beast.

There were opening weekend records too for stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo as the returning witches Glinda and Elphaba, as well as for Chu, and producer Marc Platt.

The tentpole grossed $15.5m on Imax screens, over-indexing slightly given Imax accounted for 11% of total North American screen share, and scored Imax’s biggest November box and its second biggest for a family film.

Grande and Erivo return as Glinda and Elphaba, the two protagonists on converging paths who start the film under separate and very different circumstances. Glinda is enjoying rock star status in the Emerald City while her friend Elphaba dwells in the Ozian forest fighting to free the silenced Animals and expose the truth about The Wizard. Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh also star.

Lionsgate’s Now You See Me: Now You Don’t placed second on $9.1m from 3,403 after a 57% slide in the second weekend for a $36.8m running total, followed by Disney/Fox’s Predator: Badlands on $6.3m from 3,100 sites after a 51% drop for $76.3m after three sessions; and Paramount’s The Running Man, which tumbled 65% in its second weekend on $5.8m from 3,534 venues for a $27m cumulative tally.

Searchlight’s awards hopeful Rental Family, directed by Beef’s Hikari and starring Brendan Fraser as an actor who finds meaning by working as a stand-in for strangers, arrived in fifth place $3.3m from 1,925 sites and is designed to build out during the coming weeks.

The only other opener in the top 10 was Jalmari Helmander’s action sequel Sisu: The Road To Revenge, which arrived via Sony Screen Gems on $2.6m from 2,222 sites. Jorma Tommila returns as the fearsome Finn who is not to be messed with, and the film opened behind the original’s $3.3m debut through Lionsgate in April 2023. That film finished on $7.3m in North America.

Sony Classics’ postwar thriller Nuremberg ranks eighth after three weekends on $11m, and Universal’s horror Black Phone 2 in ninth place stands at $76.4m after six sessions.

Overall, box office amounted to $185.5m and pushed the year-to-date number to $7.5bn, which tracks 3.3% ahead of 2024 by the same stage.

 

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