There’s a moment in Wicked: For Good in which the rebellious protagonist Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is debating whether to flee Oz or stay. The Land of Oz, led by a conniving despot in Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard, is full of injustice and idiocy. But fleeing won’t change Oz. Maybe, she thinks, she should stay, and work within its imperfect structures to improve it. “Oz is…a promise, an idea/ and I want to help make it come true,” she sings.
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Few people understand this sentiment more than the movie’s director, Jon M. Chu. Chu has been enmeshed in the Hollywood studio system for close to two decades, churning out splashy box-office hits based on existing IP: Step Up 2: The Streets, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Crazy Rich Asians. His ability to appeal to America’s middle and global audiences alike has made him one of the most bankable directors in the business—and a paragon of the American Dream.
“He has so many superpowers as a director, I’m not sure where to start,” Ariana Grande, who plays Elphaba’s foil Glinda, wrote in an email to TIME. “His heart and his innate understanding of the human experience. His empathy.”
But as Glinda learns, sometimes embedding yourself too deep within a powerful machine means selling false dreams, or becoming the face of a lie. “The system disappoints me all the time. And when the dream shatters in front of you, and when you know the truth, who do you become?” Chu asks during an interview inside the 30 Rock building in Manhattan in late October. “This is me, this is even America, looking back at the things we believed in: the stories we were told by Spielberg and Walt Disney; Michael Jackson making us believe we could float on air. Now we’re in a different era, we have all the information. Do we still believe in those things? Can those things coexist with the truth?”
Chu, 46, has blossomed into a major force in Hollywood precisely as the industry has come under siege. Filmmakers are at the mercy of Wall Street, corporate mergers, and streaming overlords, who largely invest in safe sequels over untested original ideas. Theater ticket sales have cratered, while AI accelerates as an existential threat. Given these many challenges, Chu could have replicated Elphaba’s “Defying Gravity” moment in the first film: to leap off the balustrades and fight the system from the outside.
But that’s not who he is. “I wish I was Elphaba. The thing I hate the most about myself is the pleasing part,” he says. “I grew up in a restaurant business, and that’s what you do: You please people. But maybe if I can rise a little bit above it, I can maneuver and give them what they want, but get what I need.”
So Chu has assumed a Glinda-like role at Hollywood’s center, and his bubble keeps ascending: Wicked: For Good arrives Nov. 21 to close out the musical adaptation, riding on the massive coattails of last year’s part one, which brought in more than $750 million at the global box office. Chu is betting that if he can reach enough people through big, blockbuster stories driven by optimism, empathy, and grace, maybe his shadows on the wall of a better America can spring to life.
“In order for us to change things or adjust how people see the world, I do think stories are at the center of it all,” he says. “To give people light and joy within the messiness: It is the flower that grows out of the concrete.”
Chu’s 1980s childhood was essentially the embodiment of Reagan’s American Dream. His father, an immigrant from China, owned a Chef Chu’s in Silicon Valley, which counted Steve Jobs and other tech elites as regulars. His mother, also an immigrant, called him Jon-Jon, a reference to John F. Kennedy. “I am the product of this beautiful idea of what America is,” he says.
Chu’s parents often took him to the movies and musical theater, and he developed a love for filmmaking as a kid, which was facilitated by generous donations of cameras and computer equipment from restaurant patrons. When he started making films, he quickly realized his power extended far beyond providing sheer entertainment, veering dangerously close to emotional manipulation. “I would do videos for my church, and saw everybody cry and get involved so much that I was like, ‘I don’t think this is about God, the dissolve to black and white to Celine Dion,’” he remembers. “I saw it was dangerous, and I stopped doing it.”
He didn’t give it up for good, of course. Chu attended USC, and wasn’t the artsiest filmmaker there: He says his classmates pigeonholed him as “the guy who’s gonna do studio movies.” Fittingly, he got a major break after graduating when Steven Spielberg saw and loved one of his shorts and helped him get meetings with execs.
But Chu struggled to get his own ideas made in his early years, and says he was often overlooked, or mistaken for someone off the call sheet altogether. “When I first got my first jobs, they would tell me, ‘Deliveries are around the corner,’” he says. “So I always feel like the underdog.”
Chu’s first director credits, like 2008’s Step Up 2: The Streets, aren’t necessarily prestigious. But he imbued these projects with kineticism and big-hearted emotion to make them sing beyond their premises. In particular, he has thrived in the creation of audacious, technically-challenging set pieces, whether it be the playing-card heist in Now You See Me 2 or a defying-gravity dance sequence for In the Heights. “Jon loves to do things that have never been done,” says Christopher Scott, the choreographer on Wicked and a longtime collaborator of Chu’s. “He’s a conceptual genius.”
Shawn Levy, a fellow blockbuster director who led last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, praises the “innate musicality in his camerawork and editing.” He adds, “Jon brings such warmth and passion to his craft, and that humanity and enthusiasm is evident in every frame.”
But even as Chu found individual success and brought joy to audiences, he struggled with finding his role in the world. “I know what it feels like for people to need the light from you, and you don’t even know who you are or where you get your own light from,” he says.
In the mid-2010s, the movie industry lurched haltingly toward greater representation after social-media campaigns called attention to the overwhelming dominance of lily-white stories and awards shows. Chu was tapped to helm Crazy Rich Asians, an escapist wealth fantasy set in Singapore. Some dismissed the story as shallow and materialistic.
But Chu saw a bigger opportunity: to shift the global perception of Asian faces and their stories in the first Hollywood blockbuster in 25 years to feature a contemporary narrative with an all-Asian cast. “Sometimes the audience is like, ‘That’s not beautiful. That’s not aspirational.’ And I’m like, ‘No, but it is. You just don’t know it,’” he says. Chu was less interested in having viewers idolize the movie’s Ferraris and palaces than the people in them: “We wanted to change visual language to say, this is what a movie star can look like: They can look like Michelle Yeoh and feel like an old classic icon from the ‘50s, like they could have been there the whole time.”
Crazy Rich Asians raked in $238 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the 2010s. The film cemented the star status of Asian actors like Yeoh and Awkwafina, accelerated a pipeline of Asian creatives in Hollywood and beyond, and crystallized Chu’s vision that he could spur social change while keeping his studio bosses happy.
“To have a movie that entertains and has a message is a very delicate dance,” he says. “I always feel like if I go all the way in just entertainment, that the reason to do it goes away. And if I go all the way into just meaning and no one comes to see it, then what’s the purpose?
Wicked is the grandest manifestation yet of Chu’s two-pronged ambition. He took over the long-simmering adaptation of the beloved musical during the pandemic, as social unrest rippled across the country and America’s deep-set inequality was exposed anew. Chu says that he, Erivo, and Grande bonded over a shared vision for how the film could carry a powerful social message. “With Cynthia and Ari, it was definitely a conspiracy. We looked at each other like, ‘They don’t even know what we’re gonna make in this,’” he says.
Grande wrote to TIME that while making the movie, she admired Chu’s “ability to look at things from many angles and to be able to humanize and fall in love with each character even when they’re their worst selves.” She adds that while Chu planned meticulously before each day, on set he was “endlessly curious and free.”
Wicked, released last November, stormed its way to no. 5 at the 2024 global box office and 10 Oscar nominations, of which it won two. Chu won Best Director at the Astra Awards, the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, and the National Board of Review. Many more nominations will undoubtedly arrive for Wicked: For Good, which Chu shot at the same time as the first, and which he conceives of as part of the same movie.
But the film is undeniably darker in both tone and palette. Elphaba and Glinda no longer attend Shiz University, where their enemies-to-friends story unfolded during parties and dining-hall dance numbers. Now, they are navigating their roles in a society defined by some very familiar themes: surveillance, propaganda, fear-mongering, and deportation—in the movie’s world, it’s the animals who are under attack.
Chu is well aware of how this movie will hit audiences in 2025, even though its ideas aren’t new. “So many of the most relevant lines were written 20 years ago about a different, post-9/11 time,” he says, referring to the 2003 debut of the Broadway musical adapted from Gregory Maquire’s 1995 novel. “And a lot of the ideas were in The Wizard of Oz 100 years ago. But even a month ago, it became more relevant than months before: Animals in cages.”
Wicked also furthers Chu’s mission of improving mainstream representation. The movie features a Black Elphaba (Erivo); an Asian Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh); and the first Nessarose—Elphaba’s younger sister, who uses a wheelchair in the musical—to be portrayed by an actual wheelchair user (Marissa Bode). The movie, however, arrives as Hollywood is backsliding on diversity, with related efforts scaled back or scrubbed in the face of President Trump’s war on DEI.
Chu says that “of course” he’s seen the industry regressing on diversity efforts. “But I’m sick of debating it and talking about it,” he says. “Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible: Could that be a debate? Sure, but I have the power to just do it and it kills the debate. We don’t do an interview about it. It just exists.”
Chu is always looking to the future: He now has five kids, and missed the L.A. premiere of Wicked for the birth of his youngest. As a certified cash cow, he now holds inordinate power to make the projects he’s interested in happen. But he’s not going indie anytime soon. “I feel the responsibility right now to continue to speak on the biggest level possible,” he says. The projects he’s working on include adaptations of Dr. Seuss’s Oh! The Places You’ll Go!; Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; and films based on the kid-friendly IP Play-Doh and Hot Wheels.
Those last two mean that Chu’s big plans include being a part of corporate America’s push to monetize their brands through the big screen, building off the massive success of Barbie. Chu’s power, and his centrality to the American entertainment machine, is now so massive that it’s fair to question whether Chu shouldn’t be compared to Glinda or Elphaba, but rather the Wizard himself. Many Americans have long feared the trope of shadowy Hollywood executives using entertainment as propaganda; of selling falsehoods to the masses.
Chu tells me he understands where the Wizard is coming from: Narrative is extremely powerful in shaping our collective psyches, and just maybe, people need simple narratives to help them understand themselves. “It’s not just this flippant entertainment. We need the story of God, whoever you think it is. We need the story of government, of nation, of world. Because we’re so scared of the unknown that this gives us a little bit of structure to exist on.”
But while other leaders have staked their visions on fear, Chu is staking his upon joy and empathy, creating worlds in which people of all stripes see each other as full, flawed individuals and forgive each other, and in which wonder springs forth from every corner. And Chu hopes that by bringing these utopian ideals of Oz—and America—to the screen, they might be able to filter into making the world a brighter, happier place.
Chu knows many will see this conviction as naive. But he doesn’t. He’s been willing his dreams into existence, every single day on set for his whole career.
“Being a creative leader, it all lives in your head for so long. You have to project this illusion of what you’re making, and everybody has to see it and go towards it,” he says. “It’s actually just light through a prism. But it has to become more and more real every time you step into it. And hopefully, by the time you reach it, it’s actually real.”
Scott, who worked on both Wicked films, says he’s seen Chu grow as a leader and increasingly fight for his beliefs. “I think where he feels the most confident to do the most change is through the system: being inside and breaking it apart,” says Scott. “But I’ve also seen him just take a stand and say, ‘No, this is what we’re doing, or else I don’t need to be part of this.’” It’s clear that Chu has maintained his Glinda worldview—but emerged on the other side with an Elphaba edge.