Eric Schwartzel

It feels almost like they're trying to manufacture virality.

After a big opening weekend, it's clear that the strategy worked. The film grossed $163 million globally, making it the highest-grossing opening weekend for a film based on a Broadway musical. And that's just for Wicked Part 1. Eric says he'll be keeping an eye on whether Universal's strategy carries through to next November, when Wicked Part 2 comes out.

I mean, what does all this say about Hollywood in 2024?

And what will it mean if it fails and it doesn't actually translate into the kind of box office numbers that they're hoping for?

You know, maybe if you sing, you know, maybe more people will go see the film.

Uh-huh.

But just short of obnoxious, so then we'll be good. Just short, yeah, yeah. That's all for today, Monday, November 25th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Monday, November 25th. Coming up on the show, how Wicked advertised its way to the top of the box office.

The new Wicked movie is based on a musical that first came out more than 20 years ago. Our colleague Eric Schwartzel is a huge fan.

That is me. I am the part of the globe that I knew that it existed before. And that is, that's about it.

That's our colleague Eric Schwartzel, who covers Hollywood. He says the marketing push is one of the biggest Hollywood has ever seen.

Wicked was first a novel that came out in 1995. And it takes the classic tale we all know, The Wizard of Oz, and casts it in a different light.

Just to point out how wild this is, the new movie Wicked is based on a musical, which is based on a book, which is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, which itself was a movie based on a musical and a book that first came out in 1900. It's a story that people clearly seem to be drawn to. Wicked the Musical opened on Broadway in 2003.

How does that one go again?

Come on. Soon enough, the show is a big Broadway hit, with Idina Menzel cast as the witch Elphaba and Kristin Chenoweth as Glenda. The musical's been on for 21 years, making Wicked one of Broadway's longest-running shows. It's been seen by more than 65 million people, and it's raked in more than $5 billion in ticket sales.

And it's also developed an enormous army of people like yourself who are massive, wicked fans. Tell me more about this fan base and how many are there of you? How many are?

If Wicked had such a loyal fan base and the Broadway show was such a huge success, why did they waste so long to make a movie?

Studio executives at Universal, which invested in the Broadway show and owned the rights to the movie, also worried about upsetting the musical's loyal fans.

So Universal took its time. It looked at different versions of scripts, fielded pitches from actresses who wanted to play the roles, and worked on getting the Broadway team to help with the movie.

Finally, studio executives felt like they'd cracked the code. But they didn't just want to make the movie. They also wanted to turn it into a massive cultural phenomenon. That's next.

Getting the right actors to play the main two witches in Wicked was a top priority for Universal. And in 2021, the studio finally landed on pop star Ariana Grande as Glenda and the Broadway phenom Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba. Fans talked about the casting choices all over social media.

Universal went big on the film's production, and when they got ready to market it, they decided to go just as big. How much money are they spending on marketing this?

What's the logic behind such a massive marketing campaign?

This year, it's been almost impossible to go anywhere without seeing some kind of promotion for the movie Wicked.

Some of the strategy mirrors last year's Barbie rollout, which relied on huge marketing to become a $1.4 billion hit. And just as Barbie star Margot Robbie wore shades of pink across her promotional tour, Erivo and Grande have taken on the red carpet strategy of dressing in green and pink from the Wicked wardrobe. 🎵

To broaden out this flood-the-zone approach, Universal executives went to their bosses at parent company Comcast and pitched Wicked as a company-wide priority.

The list of marketing partners feels like it's never ending. There are partnerships with Lexus, Build-A-Bear, Stanley, Aldo, Fossil, Forever 21, Crocs, Legos. The movie also partnered with Ulta for Wicked Makeup. I could go on and on and on and on for the rest of this podcast, but I won't. If Wicked has such a loyal fan base, though, why go so big on marketing?

Because aren't its millions of fans likely to go see the movie anyway?

Uh-huh. That seems like a tricky line. It's a very subjective line.

I think James Bond is probably fine no matter what happens. He seems to have proven his immortality.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think, you know, it's this really, it's this fascinating dynamic because Bond, The two sides have very different things to lose. And for the Broccoli's, it's this family inheritance that they've been charged with taking care of, right? So there is a lot of emotional baggage there.

But there's also real financial concerns, too, because they need to keep that franchise engine running to support Broccoli. their company and to support all of the Bond employees. Now, Amazon, of course, I think they'll survive if they don't have a new James Bond movie in the next few years. I mean, the total of the MGM acquisition overall amounts to a rounding error in their annual revenues.

But I think for a company that is trying so hard to recast itself in Hollywood as not the big, bad content machine, but instead as a new kind of Studio 2.0, this is a real black eye because it's the highest profile example of... the goods that they have, but it's also the highest profile example of how they can work with that old Hollywood approach. And so far, it's not yielding any good outcome.

I think this is a story about a beloved character who now finds himself caught between two worlds. There's the world of, let's call it the old Hollywood that James Bond grew up in. And there's now the world of the new Hollywood, which is represented by his new business partners at Amazon.

I did it!

You did, you did. Actually, yeah, you're right. Actually, your long con has paid off. No lyrics, though, but it still counts. I don't know if I, I don't, well, it helps that I don't think there are lyrics to that theme song. Yeah, that's what I mean, yeah.

Yeah, funny, funny, funny.

the absolute impasse and tension that has resulted from those two versions of Hollywood trying to work together.

You know, I do like a cold martini. Shaken or stirred? I actually prefer stirred. I think most people do. That's where Bond and I differ. The only thing that Bond and I differ on, yes.

Then, of course, the rest is history. I mean, Sean Connery is cast as the first 007. And really, almost every other year or so, we start to see a new James Bond movie.

And so the first film under their auspices was GoldenEye.

Good. So it was the first one starring Pierce Brosnan as 007, spawned an incredibly popular video game. Spent a lot of time playing that as a kid. An all-time N64 hit. And then also kind of brought Bond into this kind of blockbuster era where these movies were massive events, massive spectacles.

And after the Brosnan era ended, Daniel Craig comes on and the films get yet bigger and even more global.

So I talked to folks who worked with her in several capacities. And to a person, they all said, you know, Barbara Broccoli is one of those names that a lot of people outside of Hollywood have never heard. But when it comes to the Bond franchise, she is the keeper of the kingdom. And that goes to decisions big and small. So she decides, along with others in her family, who will play Bond.

And she really prides herself on having that kind of gut instinct behind Because Bond is often played by an actor who is previously a relative unknown in the industry. And it's very obvious to anyone who comes close to this franchise that whatever idea you have, whether you're a director or whether you are a licensing partner, whatever idea you have, it's going to go through Barbara.

I talked to people who worked on set with her who described it almost as kind of like a den mother mentality. She really will, everything from like individual lines of dialogue to managing relationships between the director and the crew.

Amazon has this streaming service, Prime Video, and every streaming service needs an almost endless repository of programming to fill with it. And so they absorb MGM, and with that absorption comes the right to distribute James Bond films. James Bond is kind of seen as the crown jewel of the MGM library that Amazon has absorbed.

Before the deal closed, Amazon executives got together and started brainstorming just what they might be able to do with Bond in their ecosystem. And they thought maybe should there be spinoffs? You know, there are like all these other characters like Moneypenny who could serve as the basis of their own shows. There was conversations around maybe a female 007 starring on a TV show.

Really, just the kind of like brainstorming that I think any executive team would do when they have this really famous asset coming into the tent.

Terribly. It is an incredibly fraught situation. I mean, the relationship has really frayed. You know, this was one thing that I will say became pretty clear in the course of reporting this story. I always strive for nuance in my reporting, but on that question, the answer was pretty black and white, which is that Barbara Broccoli has...

told many friends that she thinks the people at Amazon are idiots.

It is a long and storied franchise that has really survived so many eras of Hollywood and the world. I mean, it's hard to think of a 20th century character that has had the imprint that James Bond has like that.

To keep it PG-13. I would say, you know, I think it's a combination of things. I think there has been skepticism from the jump that Amazon is the right place for a Hollywood property like this. And then I think since then,

There have been times where she feels as though those concerns have been validated in how the company has approached working with her and what she can imagine working with him on any Bond film would be like.

there have been a few situations where the vibes have been off and where it seems as though there's a philosophical difference between how the Broccoli's approach moviemaking and how Amazon does. And this was really typified for me in a story I heard about a conversation that was had between Barbara Broccoli and Jen Salke, who is Amazon's top entertainment executive here in LA.

And it was early in their relationship, And Jen Salke referred to Bond as, quote, content.

Art, storytelling, right, exactly. And this was a story that was almost recited like a fable by Barbara to other people as symbolic of the gulf between Amazon's approach and her approach, which is that Bond, this character who her family has shepherded and mythologized, is referred to by this sterile, transactional term of content, right?

I think it serves as this very harsh reminder to people in Hollywood that the shows and movies that they work so hard on are being treated as these assets to be shoved into the piping.

The Broccoli family feels as though one reason James Bond has had the longevity it has as a franchise is its scarcity. James Bond really only exists as theatrical movies that are released every few years and And so there is always been a reflexive skepticism toward anyone who wants to do anything more saturated than that.

I mean, there have been people who have approached them with so many ideas over the years for Bond TV shows. There was even a potential Bond casino that was floated at one point. And the response is always, you know, no, this has stayed special for a reason. And part of that reason is scarcity.

Yes, my name is Eric Schwartzel. I am a reporter in the Los Angeles Bureau of the Journal.

And so Barbara Broccoli has said many times that casting bond is often a gut decision. She's equated it to choosing a spouse. It's something you know. It's something you just, you don't sort of look to facts or figures to confirm. It's a gut instinct.

And some people I spoke to who worked at Amazon said the idea of casting such a giant role with an unknown actor with no track record is the kind of risk that a studio like Amazon isn't built to make.

And so as recently as last month, I was told Barbara Broccoli was describing the status as no script, no story, no bond. That sounds like a long way off from having another movie. It does, yeah. And things can turn a corner and then move very quickly from there. But I just think that a lot of people now know that this is a very tense situation with very little idea of where to go from here.

So one concern people have is, you know, if Bond goes away for too long, will it be hard to rev up that engine of interest again? Some people also think, though, that scarcity can be a good thing and disappearing for a while will only sort of cause the appetite for Bond to grow. I think the concern for those working on the franchise today is that there's no progress in any direction.

And so she really seems to think that people will come and go. The priority has to be making sure Bond lives forever. And there's this quote of her father's that she often recites whenever she's faced with a situation like the she is now where there's a new partner in town like Amazon. And she says, never let people in temporary positions of power make permanent decisions.

And it really, I think, crystallizes what she sees as a mythic project that can't be concerned about who's in the executive chair this week or what quarterly returns will satisfy investors.