Jon M. Chu Already Knows <em>Wicked: For Good</em> Is a Hit. He's Aiming Bigger.

Just before the director Jon M. Chu premiered Wicked in theaters last fall, he had a surprise encounter while walking on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood. Even on an average day at Universal, you’re likely to pass by the Bates Motel, the stand-in for a certain time-traveling DeLorean, and a tram overflowing with tourists. It’s a semi-surreal environment where one learns to expect the unexpected. But Chu was nevertheless stunned when he ran into Steven Spielberg—and the fabled director said he wanted to screen Wicked with him.

“I want you to be sitting right next to me and I want to see it in Dolby Atmos,” Chu remembers him saying. The man who directed Jaws and Jurassic Park isn’t exactly someone you say no to. So Chu dutifully arranged to show his movie adaptation of the acclaimed Broadway musical to his childhood idol. They ended up talking for nearly an hour afterward, with Spielberg asking endless questions about how Chu had pulled off certain shots and effects. The idea that a maestro like Spielberg could be interested in how he made a movie remains hard for Chu to grasp. “There’s no way he cared,” Chu says, laughing and poking fun at himself. “But he believed that he cared and was listening and engaged.”

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One year later and Chu is in a familiar spot: He’s putting the finishing touches on the sequel, Wicked: For Good, which hits theaters November 21. (If you’re unfamiliar, Wicked is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, reframing L. Frank Baum’s story to show the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view.) The forty-five-year-old director is talking to me over Zoom from a set. He’s using the time he has before the new Wicked hits theaters to direct a commercial, and he’s sprawled out on the couch in his trailer.

The critical acclaim of the first installment of Wicked and its overwhelming commercial success—$756 million at the global box office—validated the bold decision by Chu and the producers to make the adaptation of the Broadway show into two separate movies. One gets the sense that Chu is very confident in the follow-up, which sees the return of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, who each received an Oscar nomination for her role in the film. “What people don’t know is that when they finish movie two, they will feel the master plan of it all,” he teases. “They only have a hint of it.”

Wicked die-hards will certainly have an idea of Chu’s grand scheme. Wicked: For Good will adapt the second act of the play, where Elphaba (Erivo) has gone full Wicked Witch of the West—unfairly villainized after she stood up to the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) at the end of the first film. Glinda (Grande) and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) will return. Newcomers to the tale will find Wicked: For Good decidedly darker than its predecessor, as the plot hurtles toward the climactic appearance of Dorothy and Co.—including Colman Domingo as the Cowardly Lion. Mostly, though, Chu is just excited for you to witness Grande and Erivo’s performances one more time. “If you thought these girls were great in movie one—oh my God,” he says. “This is where they come to play.”

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Chu, who is fast-talking, earnest, and able to make just about anything into an Oz-ian metaphor, has earned the right to dabble in some Wizard-esque proclamations. The director was born in Palo Alto, where he watched his immigrant parents—his father was from mainland China and his mother grew up in Taiwan—build a Chinese restaurant from the ground up. (Chef Chu’s is now a local legend, once frequented by another hero of Chu’s: Steve Jobs.) He fell in love with filmmaking, graduated from USC’s prestigious film school, and eventually earned his big break directing 2008’s Step Up 2: The Streets, after years of struggling to get any of his projects into production. Over the next decade-plus, Chu skillfully flip-flopped between genres, directing G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Now You See Me 2, the Lin-Manuel Miranda movie musical In the Heights, and Crazy Rich Asians, which not only ignited a much-needed conversation about Asian representation in Hollywood but also was a major hit at the box office.

By the time Wicked, a dream project, entered Chu’s life, it felt like the world finally knew exactly what a Jon M. Chu film was: Spielbergian in scale, full of heart, teary-eyed, action-packed, and always with a powerful soundtrack coursing through its veins.

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Even though Chu was snubbed for a Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards, Wicked’s success comes with a perk he deems far more important. “I am literally in a position that I can get things made, and so I should get as many things made as possible that follow my belief system,” he says. “Are you going to just make other sequels? Or in this privileged moment, will you have the courage to say [what you want to say], even if you think that everyone is going to be like, ‘Another joyful movie from Jon!’ Joy can be beautiful. It can be controversial. It takes just as much courage to do that. And I’m going to show that it can be just as entertaining.”

Based on his list of upcoming projects, it appears he has a couple decades’ worth of joyful filmmaking in development. He’ll direct Mattel’s Hot Wheels movie, with J. J. Abrams’s Bad Robot producing. (“It’s early days,” says Chu. “J. J. had this great concept for an entryway into it.”) Chu will also helm an animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! as well as big-screen takes on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the sci-fi video game Split Fiction. Chu even says he’s still working on his long-gestating Play-Doh movie. Oh, and he’s also working on a Broadway staging of Crazy Rich Asians, too, because why not?

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Speaking of: When I ask if the rumored Crazy Rich Asians sequel series on HBO Max will materialize, he confirms: “It’s a real thing. We have scripts, and we’re waiting to be officially ready to go. Our cast will be there.” Chu will look to the second book in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy—2015’s China Rich Girlfriend—for inspiration. “It's hard to do the continuation of the books, because our characters changed so much in the first movie,” he says. “It's so different [from] the books, actually, even though it feels like it's the same. So you couldn't go one to one. But we can use a lot of inspiration from the book to dig out more story from it.”

This article appeared in the October/November 2025 issue of Esquiresubscribe

Out of the entire JMCCU (Jon M. Chu Cinematic Universe), what’s his white whale? For the one and only time in our chat, Chu is genuinely stumped. After a few beats, he mentions the upcoming Britney Spears biopic, which he’s long been attached to. Reading the pop singer’s 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, was profound for Chu—and he’s desperate to tell her story. “She did what she had to do to survive. She deserves a story that honors that. Now that she has her freedom, what does freedom actually cost? And what does that look like? What can we do most to encourage her to be free and not try to turn her into whatever we want her to be?”

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Chu will treat the darker aspects of Spears’s story with as much seriousness as the inevitable “...Baby One More Time” needle-drop—and that shouldn’t surprise you. Have you seen Wicked? Oz shares a few too many things with our country nowadays: A tyrannical ruler, rampant othering, and civilians who are all too eager to solve problems via fire and brimstone. Chu isn't oblivious to the real-life parallels. In fact, he leaned into it. “We're at a time where it got way more complicated in the world during the making of this movie,” he says. “The relevancy is crazy. [Wicked] was not written for this time. Suddenly, these words mean something different than when we first shot them.”

As Chu jokingly puts it when riffing on the vibe of Wicked: For Good: “The people who want all the sugar candy stuff—it’s not that! This goes there.”

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His passion for moviemaking is so captivating that at times it almost feels like Jon M. Chu is living in a Jon M. Chu movie. I start to imagine the voice-over: As AI, greedy studio heads, and entirely too many superhero flicks threaten Hollywood, one intrepid director’s belief in the power of a damn good story saves the day!

In fact, the director ends our chat with a three-plus-minute Remember the Titans–style monologue on why storytelling is hardly dead yet. “Yes, there are questions with AI and what it’s going to do, but no technology has ever defeated human beings,” he begins, slowly gaining steam. “It takes our natural courage to pursue new ways of telling a story. We spend so much time complaining about what’s wrong that we forget what we can be about! What we should be pursuing! What we should be dreaming about!”

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I kindly inform Chu that not only did he go full Denzel Washington on me but that he really ought to add a sports movie to his ballooning oeuvre. “I love sports movies,” he says with a knowing smile. “One day.”

I take it as a promise.

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As seen in the opening image: Jacket ($8,300), shirt ($710), and tie ($260) by Dior Men; sunglasses ($850) by Jacques Marie Mage.Story by Brady Langmann Photographs by Guy ArochStyling by Alfonso Fernández NavasHair by Eleazar Baltazar. Grooming by Su Naeem for Epicutis at Dew Beauty Agency. Tailoring by Todd Thomas. Production by Ash Wendell. Esquire Executive Design Director: Martin HoopsEsquire Visual Director: James MorrisEsquire Entertainment Director: Andrea CuttlerEditor in Chief: Michael Sebastian