Wicked flies high with second biggest Australian opening weekend in 2024
If it seems like your social feed is being clogged with everyone’s emotional and excited responses to Wicked, it’s because the movie adaptation was the number one ticket this weekend.
Wicked easily won the weekend box office in Australia with $8.96 million, extended to $10.3m if you include Wednesday night previews. It was ahead of Gladiator II, which took in $4.14m on its second weekend.
Wicked is the second highest opening weekend in Australia this year, behind Deadpool & Wolverine and just ahead of Inside Out 2.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Wicked is the screen adaptation of a Broadway musical which opened in 2003, which itself was drawn from a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, which told the revisionist origin story of The Wicked Witch of the West from the L. Frank Baum books and 1939 movie. If you’re keeping score, that makes it the fourth generation of the story.
It stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the later named Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande as Galinda, later Glinda the Good. It was directed by Crazy Rich Asians helmer Jon M. Chu.
Globally, Wicked broke the record for highest opening based on a Broadway musical, besting the 2012 version of Les Miserables. It’s also the highest opener for a movie that isn’t a sequel in an existing franchise, although Wicked: Part Two will be released this time next year.
In the all-important North American market, Wicked sold $US114m in tickets adding to a global total of $US165m.
In the US, the moviegoing weekend as framed as a Barbenheimer rematch with Wicked and Gladiator II coined as “Glicked” – two blockbusters, one female-skewed, one male-skewed, fighting for box office dominance. Gladiator II made $US55.5m in the US.
However, the “Glicked” movement never caught on to the same feverish levels as Barbie and Oppenheimer, partly because that had been an organic thing, and partly because in most international markets including in Australia and the UK, Gladiator II had debuted the previous weekend.
Gladiator II’s opening weekend box office in Australia was $6.95 million.
While both movies are performing well with audiences, Wicked also has the edge with a 90 per cent critics score and 97 per cent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes to Gladiator II’s 72 per cent critics and 84 per cent audience grades.
