Jon M. Chu really did not want to call his next movie Wicked: Part Two

For a guy who’s spent the last several years of his life taking a well-known pop culture artifact and breaking it into two distinct parts, Jon M. Chu sure does have a lot of contempt for calling films “Part Two.” Chu—whose 2024 film Wicked (as its title clearly implies) adapted the entirety (of the first half) of the stage musical of the same name—was talking to Variety this week, when asked to address the decision to call the film’s continuation Wicked: For Good instead of something more straightforward.

“Who wants a movie called Wicked: Part Two?” Chu rhetorically asked, adding that the For Good title—a reference to one of the musical’s final songs, which will presumably appear in the November 2025 movie—had been on the movie’s script since he and his team made the big split back in 2021, during pre-production on what would turn out to be the pair of films. “It was just a point of like, ‘Do we really want to call this Part Two?’ And nobody wants that.”

Full confession: We do not get this particular stance, which also presumably explains why the 2024 movie was released without any kind of subtitle suggesting it was only half of the story being told. There’s a suggestion that marketing people don’t like the whole “Part Two” naming convention, although it certainly didn’t seem to hurt Dune‘s fortunes at the box office earlier in 2024. But Chu seems to genuinely hate the idea of treating his two movies like two halves of a whole, even though he shot them concurrently, and ends the first movie on a note that only works because every single person in the audience knows there’s another movie coming in a year. Man’s allowed to call his movie whatever he/the studio likes, of course, but his apparently genuine contempt for calling the second part of something Wicked: Part Two is weirdly vehement. (This is, after all, the guy who cut the Part One from the first movie’s title because he didn’t want audiences to feel like it was “half the homework.”)