‘Wicked’ Hopes to Turn Its Massive Marketing Campaign Into a Box Office Windfall

By Jeremy Fuster

Seven months ago at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, Universal capped off its presentation to movie theater owners with a colorful LED light show featuring thousands of flowers handed out to audience members and set to an instrumental version of “Defying Gravity,” the musical number in the first installment of Jon M. Chu’s two-part adaptation of the Broadway classic “Wicked.”

That screening kicked off a global, no-expense-spared, nine-digit marketing campaign that Universal hopes will turn “Wicked” into one of the biggest box office hits of the year — and perhaps in doing so buck the trend of movie musicals either flaming out in theaters or having to hide their musical numbers to win over a wider audience.