Wicked director explains the reason why Defying Gravity was so different in the film

Wicked made history as the biggest film debut of 2024 this weekend and made theatre kids’ dreams come true. The most annoying person in your life was waiting with bated breath for the very last song in the movie, which was of course the infamous Defying Gravity. The song itself was broken up with dialogue, suspense and dramatic buildup and lasted about 15 minutes to get through. It was so well done, you definitely left the cinema teary-eyed. But why was Defying Gravity so different from the Wicked musical version on stage? There are a few reasons why, and director Jon Chu has explained the huge process of filming the very dramatic finale of the musical-turned-film.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Jon Chu said that there was absolutely no alternative to making Defying Gravity a dramatic number. It was actually the reason Wicked had to be split into two parts.

“We tried to make it into one movie, and you had to rip out songs and it became not Wicked. They had tried for 20 years to do that. I think the decision to make it one really opened the doors to like, ‘okay, we have to believe these characters.’ You get away with things on stage that you can’t get away with in a movie. The audience is more sceptical in a movie, and so the emotional turns for the actors and for the characters have to be very solid. So it came out of a necessity more than anything.”

However, Jon said that Defying Gravity on its own “doesn’t actually feel like the end of this epic journey that we’ve gone on,” and made the “scary” decision to “break it up a bit.”

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“We questioned ourselves at every turn. We did not make decisions lightly. We actually could make decisions and go backwards. We tried all versions, always. But at the end of the day, it was like, ‘I’m rooting for Elphaba to have this for herself, and she can’t just get it. She has to earn it, too,'” he explained.

“She knows at this moment that you don’t have to prove yourself to anyone. She has to prove it to herself. How do we show that through this number that already exists? And you’re not going to add new words to it. So what are you going to do?”

via YouTube

Jon Chu said that the way he filmed the song “[brought] back all the stuff in the movie that we’ve seen, all the doubts that have been put upon her, that she has to make a decision that is for herself – or for this little girl, for whatever way you want to interpret it – so that when she says, ‘it’s me,’ the ultimate goal for us this whole movie, we’ve been saying, ‘it’s not for anybody else, it’s for me,’ that she stands up and sings Defying Gravity.”

Jon said it really wasn’t something that could have been done in one film, otherwise “you couldn’t have those moments.”