How to Host a Wicked Movie Marathon

As my kids get older (now ages 10 to 16), it becomes more and more important to me that we create specific memories that the look back on with fondness when they are adults. A couple years ago we did a Harry Potter movie marathon. That was a bit intense, but definitely worth it. Early this year we threw an Olympics Party with friends. Early this month we hosted a murdery mystery party using a boxed kit. This Wicked Movie marathon took almost no time to plan and it was just as fun and memorable. To be honest, my kids had never even seen Wicked. They typically don’t like musicals and the runtime was a little intimidating, so they weren’t even sure they wanted to watch it. However, when we decided to make it in to a party, they were completely on board.

Now, you COULD include the Wizard of Oz in this marathon as the first movie. The 1939 classic is 1 hour and 42 minutes. Honestly, my kids and I had thought both Wickeds were 3 hours each, which was why we turned it into a whole day event with intermissions, but the movies were not actually that long. The first one is 2 hours and 40 minutes. The second is only 2 hours and 18 minutes. If you just do the two Wickeds, teh total time spent starting at a screen is only 5 hours (which was WAY better than our Harry Potter day). If you add Wizard of Oz, that brings you to around 6.5 hours, which is still very doable. We ended up inviting some extended family members, so we watched the classic Wizard of Oz the night before. That held up way better than I thought it would! I think all my kids had already seen it, but my youngest kids were very young the last time we watched it.

On the actual day of the event, we planned for family to arrive around 10:30 am. We had some appetizers and started the movie a little before 11 am and finished around 2 pm including bathroom breaks. Then we had lunch and started the next movie around 2:30 pm and were done by 5 pm. Overall, it worked out to a very relaxing, unhurried schedule and still left time in our evening for other activities.

The Decorations

I think planning the decorations and the food is the most fun for my daughter and me. The planning itself becomes a bonding event. When I planned Harry Potter, I wanted everything to be a surprise, so I did most of it myself and then decorated and prepped overnight while the kids slept. This time, my daughter helped plan decorations and then everyone helped blow up balloons and set things up. This tactic was definitely a lot easier on me and also I think make the experience more memorable for them, so we will definitely have a lot more family involvement in this stage for future events.

Our budget for this party, especially decorations, was quite low. We decided on a pink and green theme and just went to the dollar store. We found a REALLY cheap balloon arch that was only about 18 inches in diameter. It broke almost immediately when I tried to put the circle together and bend it, but we were able to repair it to a sufficient degree. The circle is just not a perfect circle. I think it was $1.25, so I’ve been meaning to go back and get another one so we’ll have spare pieces when we do this again.

At the dollar store, we also bought like 3 different packs of balloons that contained pink and green options as well as a few different fake flowers that were a dollar each. In addition to adding them to the balloon arch, we placed the balloons in flowers in a few places around our home, such as around the fireplace, and hung balloons from the ceiling, which apparently I didn’t take a picture of.

I also updated our chalkboard art sign and made my kids a sign using a quote from the movie. This one actually still said I solemnly swear I am up to no good from 2 years ago! I don’t think I will leave this one up as long, but it’s a nice reminder of a little memory.

This one got erased the next day, but I also made my kids another themed sign on our whiteboard that we use for school. All together, I spent between $10 and $15 on decorations.

This would have been more expensive to buy for the party, but we already owned it. At the library last summer, they were giving away prizes as part of their summer reading program. I really wanted to win the movie themed one which had included in it a light box and popcorn cups (Amazon affiliate links). I didn’t win, so at the end, I just bought myself those two items from the basket so our family movie nights could feel more special.

Wicked Food

The food is where the real money went, but honestly, I don’t feel bad about spending money on food since it all gets eaten eventually anyway. (I wouldn’t normally buy so much junk food, so my kids were really happy at the next week’s worth of snacks.) I accidentally made so much pink rice that we were having “Wicked burritos” with leftover green tortillas, beans, cheese, salsa, and pink rice for the whole week.

To start our party planning process, the week before our party, we were specifically on the lookout of pink and green foods.

We did not end up using all our ideas, but here are some of the pink foods we brainstormed.

watermelon
strawberries
raspberries
red potatoes
salsa
salami
summer sausage
strawberry muffins
pink cookies
pink candies
pink yogurt covered pretzels
using beet juice as dye

Here were some of our green ideas:

green grapes
kiwi
honeydew melon
guacamole
green apples
celery
snap peas
cucumbers
zucchini
pistachios
pickles
edamame
spinach tortillas
wasabe peas
green candy
green pesto

I feel like this charcuterie board was the highlight of our planning. It was very improvied, but we made and “emerald city” out of celery (which was toothpicked together, but that’s okay, because with so many sugary treats, no one tried to eat it), and a “yellow brick road” out of cheese. My daughter and I had a lot of fun assembling this.

We are definitely not professional charcuterie board assemblers by any means, but it seems pretty straight forward. Get some board, put some containers around it and fill until it’s full! I used a metal book end and two boards of different heights to hold up our “palace.”

We mainly put our pure treats on the front cutting board, like the candies and crackers that we don’t normally have. On the back, we put our healthier snacks like the fruits and vegetables.

I actually forgot we had found these watermelon plates and napkins that fit our theme perfectly! We also made a couple pastas. One of them we has just pasta with pesto sauce to make it green and for the other, we died the pasta pink using beat juice, but I think we got a little carried away. We probably could have used less! That one was just pasta with chopped up zucchini and celery with some italian dressing.

Everyone can get involved in helping prepare the food even if it’s as simple as washing grapes and taking them off the stems.

My daughter made the ranch dip pink by adding a little beat juice to it.

My 12 year old helped to make a watermelon and honeydew salad using a melon baller.

My oldest made strawberry muffins with cornflakes on top.

My daughter also made green chips by cooking cut spinach tortillas for a few minutes in the air fryer. You have to really watch those so they don’t get too toasty! We served them with salsa and guacamole.

We were pretty excited to also find some sparkling juices at Trader Joe’s that were pink and green. They were delicious! We definitey splurged on a few things that we would not normally get.

For the actual lunch that we served between the first and the second movie, we decided to make avocado rolls, which my kids LOVE, but I usually only make sushi for someone’s birthday since they require a bit more work and planning than I’m habit of exerting. We decided to die the rice pink with beet juice by adding beet juice to the rice vinegar before we added it to the cooked rice. I definitely went overboard. I feel like I barely used any beet juice, but I should have used much less, because it turned the rice bright pink. To make it feel less harsh, I had the brilliant idea of making a second batch of rice and mixing them together thinking that would diffuse the color, but instead, we just had speckled sushi.

It ended up looking really neat. The only problem was that I made so much sushi rice that we were eating sushi rice for days. 😂

I forgot to take pictures since they were in the freezer, but we also had strawberry (pink) and macha (green) flavored mochi ice cream balls from Trader Joe’s for desert. Overall, the day was a success! My kids even liked the movies, LOL. Not as much as the original Wizard of Oz, but given their latent distaste for musicals it could have been a huge failure. I think possibly if we hadn’t turned it into such a big event, it might have been, but given all the work that we put into it, it turned into a memorable pleasant day.

Whether or not you use any of these ideas to create your own Wicked-themed party, I hope our experience inspires you to make some memories with your kids while they are still young! We are thinking that we want to do a National Treasure movie day next. I really have no ideas on food yet, but I thought it would be fun to build some puzzle solving into the day. My kids are really loving the Enola Holmes movies on Netflix so I told them in a like 10 year when they are all adults, we are going to make a plan for them to all come back so we can have an Enola Holmes movie marathon. Stay tuned! 😂