Practical Magic 2 Opens Thursday. Here Is What 28 Years of Waiting Actually Bought.

Here is a fact that would have sounded absurd in October 1998: Practical Magic 2 is tracking to be Warner Bros.' biggest opening weekend of the year so far. The original opened to $13.1 million, finished with $46.7 million domestic against a budget around $75 million, and got a two-star review from Roger Ebert that called it too scary for children and too childish for adults. Warner Bros. wrote it off. The audience did not.

Twenty-eight years later, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are back as Sally and Gillian Owens, the aunts are back, and the studio is back with a much bigger bet. The film opens in North American theaters this Thursday, September 10. Here is what you are walking into, and what the people who have already seen it are saying.

How a flop became a franchise

Practical Magic did not become a cult classic through revival screenings or a critical reappraisal. It became one through repetition. Every October, a very specific and very large audience put it on again: the Victorian house on the water, the midnight margaritas, Stevie Nicks on the soundtrack, two sisters trying to outrun a family curse. Rotten Tomatoes still has it at 30 percent with critics. The audience score sits in the 70s. That gap is the whole story.

The streaming era made the gap legible. When the film returned to Max on October 1, 2024, it was in the platform's top five within a day. It has spent long stretches inside Hulu's top ten in the run-up to the sequel. Warner Bros. announced the sequel in June 2024, Kidman confirmed she and Bullock were both in, and Susanne Bier signed on to direct in May 2025. Streaming data finally counted an audience the original's critics never saw.

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Who is in it, and who is not

The returning core is the reason this exists. Bullock and Kidman are back as Sally and Gillian, and both are producers this time alongside Denise Di Novi. Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest return as Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet. The new generation is the sequel's actual engine:

• Joey King as Kylie Owens and Maisie Williams as Antonia Owens, Sally's now-grown daughters, both recast from the child actors in the original.
• Lee Pace as Ian Wright, described as a scholar of the craft who helps Sally unlock new powers, and perhaps something more.
• Xolo Maridueña as Gideon and Solly McLeod as Thomas Lockland, the two new men in the daughters' orbit.

The notable absence is Aidan Quinn. His Gary Hallet, the detective who fell for Sally in the first film, is not in the sequel. Bullock addressed it at CinemaCon in April, suggesting that anyone who remembers the Owens curse (the men who love an Owens woman die young) can guess why. Quinn said separately he was never asked, and would have come back. Either way, the film is built on that loss.

The story

The screenplay is by Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the 1998 film, along with Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel. It adapts The Book of Magic, the 2021 novel that closed Alice Hoffman's four-book Owens family cycle. The official synopsis keeps it deliberately vague: the Owens sisters must confront the dark curse that threatens to unravel their family once and for all. The setup is roughly 25 years after the original, and the inciting incident is a discovery about the family's history and where its magic comes from.

That is a bigger canvas than the first film, which was essentially a small-town romance with a dead boyfriend in the garden. At 130 minutes, this one is a full family saga.

The director choice is the interesting part

Susanne Bier is not an obvious pick for a comfort-movie sequel, and that is why it is worth paying attention. She won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film with In a Better World, then built a reputation for controlled, adult tension: The Night Manager, Bird Box, The Undoing. The original Practical Magic had a famously wobbly tone, with a score by Michael Nyman swapped out for Alan Silvestri at the last minute. Bier's whole career is tonal control. If the sequel plays as a real drama about inheritance rather than a nostalgia reel, she is the reason.

The music side leans into the legacy. Rupert Gregson-Williams scores. Fleetwood Mac's Landslide is in the film, keeping Stevie Nicks in the Owens house, and Olivia Rodrigo's The Cure appears too.

What the first reactions say

The London premiere was August 26 at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square, and the social embargo has lifted. The pattern is consistent and worth knowing before you buy a ticket. Nearly everyone praises the Bullock and Kidman chemistry as the film's best asset. Nearly everyone also says it is too long, with one critic putting the excess at 30 minutes and another describing five different stories running at once. The daughters' dynamic, per several reactions, gets less screen time than the casting promised. Full reviews and a Rotten Tomatoes score were not yet posted at the time of writing.

That is a mixed report, not a disastrous one. It also describes the original almost exactly: critics shrugged, and the people the movie was actually for did not care. Whether that repeats at this scale is the real question of the weekend.

The numbers to watch

Tracking has the opening weekend north of $40 million domestic, with Box Office Theory at $46.5 million and the full range of estimates running from about $30 million to $54 million. Any figure in that band would triple the original's debut, would likely clear the first film's entire domestic run in three days, and would be the first Warner Bros. release of 2026 to open above $40 million.

The competition is thin. Runner, The Uprising, and the Oasis documentary are all tracking in the single digits. The only real obstacle is the second weekend of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which just posted the biggest opening in history and will still be eating screens. Counter-programming a $360 million superhero opening with two witches and a margarita blender is exactly the kind of September bet we flagged in our September theatrical preview, and it looks like it will pay.

The useful homework before Thursday is obvious: rewatch the original. Then the argument starts. Does the sequel beat it? Where does Practical Magic itself sit against Hocus Pocus, The Craft, and the rest of the October witch canon? That is exactly what a head-to-head movie tier list is for. Rank the 1998 film on Shortlist this week, then slot the sequel in on Friday and see whether 28 years of waiting moved the needle.

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