Practical Magic 2

In October of 1998, Practical Magic opened with a debut weekend gross of $13.1 million. That was good enough for first place, narrowly edging out Universal’s self-parodic Bride of Chucky reboot, which itself narrowly bested the third weekend take of DreamWorks’ pioneering CG comedy Antz. Practical went on to gross $47 M domestically and $51 M worldwide, unprofitable numbers given its then fairly steep $75 M production budget.

The makers of the film probably thought that’s that. This is, after all, where the story ends for the vast majority of movies. As Practical was no awards contender (outside of the Blockbuster Video variety), all they could really hope for was a strong showing on home video, where collectible DVD was in its infancy and people still rented VHS cassettes. Even so, the best-case scenario was that home video would cut into the theatrical losses. Maybe people would find and enjoy the film and those residual checks for leading ladies Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, director Griffin Dunne, author Alice Hoffman, and so on might be a little more than expected.

And yet, here we are twenty-eight autumns later, still thinking and talking about this movie. Practical Magic 2 opens in theaters tomorrow and is predicted to gross $40 million in its opening frame, dethroning Spider-Man: Brand New Day with ease after six weekends at #1. How did we get here?

Well, that little 1998 movie about a pair of New England sister witches whose family was struck with a curse that doomed anyone with whom they fell in love did find an audience over time. It was the kind of movie that could and did play on cable television for decades to come. You didn’t have to catch the beginning. You didn’t have to stay for the end. If you caught the scene of Sally (Bullock) and Gilly (Kidman) cutting loose and making midnight margaritas to the sounds of Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut”, that was just fine. Any time of day. Any time of year, but all the better in fall when most Halloween-adjacent movies involve carnage and terror unfit for basic cable. Enough people saw the original movie to develop lasting, meaningful affection for it.

Cut to the present day, where nostalgia is big business. The thinking in Hollywood used to be “strike while the iron’s hot.” If something was a success, producers had a ticking clock over their heads to make sure their sequel came out before passion faded. Today, it almost feels like the opposite is true. You’ve got to wait until the nostalgia matures and the audience is multi-generational. The Top Gun franchise topped the box office in 1986 and 2022. Past success or failure is almost irrelevant. Was anyone clamoring for more of the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies? And yet, seven years after the second of those fell short of studio hopes, Garfield and his Spider-Verse became an integral selling point for the behemothic No Way Home.

Warner Bros. experienced the lucrative joy of a perfectly timed legacy sequel two Septembers ago with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The first movie had performed pretty well back in 1988, earning $75 M. The sequel, arriving 36 years later, was much, much bigger, grossing nearly half a billion worldwide. Practical Magic 2 might not soar that high, but it is poised to perform commercially, which is great news for Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders, Bullock, Kidman, Hoffman, and anyone directly associated with the IP. Is it great news for those who discovered and embraced the original movie at some point over the last twenty-eight years? I’m not sure.

While the story of it gradually finding an appreciative audience, Hocus Pocus-style, inspires, the original Practical has never impressed me as a film. It’s kind of fun, rather silly, and pretty ridiculous. Practical Magic 2 is all of these things and at 130 minutes, there’s about a half-hour of silly ridiculousness that I could have done without. But fans want more, not less, or so seems to be the logic guiding Warner Bros., director Susanne Bier (Bird Box), and the trio of screenwriters at work here.

Adapting The Book of Magic (2021), the third and most recent sequel novel that Hoffman has written over the past decade, Practical 2 takes Sally, Gilly, and, separately, one of Sally’s daughters to England. That daughter, Kylie (Joey King), has just had her boyfriend Gideon (Xolo Maridueña) struck by a car while bicycling from a flower market. The young couple had just professed their love to one another and Kylie, who has been kept in the dark about her witching powers, finally learns about the Owens familly curse. While Gideon lies in a coma, Kylie runs off with an enchanted book beloning to her great-aunt Jet (Dianne Wiest), determined to break the love hex.

Sally and Gilly, meanwhile, visit Ian Wright (Lee Pace), a professor of magic whose true nature is in question while his potential as a love interest to Sally is clear as the day.

Watching this sequel, I was always aware that I did not enter with the personal connection to this material that the target audience is expected to have. That made the creative disappointments easy to spot, but also easy to forgive. I wish that Bier and company had made a sequel worthy of the excitement that was palpable at last night’s well-attended advance screening. But I am not terribly surprised or upset that they haven’t. Cinema much better and worse than Practical Magic 2 exists in abundance in the present day and rather than detail and bemoan the overdramatic climax involving a blazing hexagram and some CG-enhanced palm heart lines, I found myself appreciating this fan service production on levels other than its slick, hollow surface. Like the fact that the industry that has shown little regard for adults in recent years has now made something big with a predecessor you’d have to be at least in your late thirties to remember seeing when it was new. Or the fact that we’re getting, in wide theatrical release no less, a $75 million sequel whose leading actresses are now 62 and 59 years old. In Hollywood, the place where actresses traditionally haven’t gotten lead roles past the age of forty.

Honestly, Practical Magic 2 is more interesting as an anthropological study than as a movie. Because this film might be the most significant evidence we have of how people are aging differently — or, rather not aging — in the present day. And by “people”, I mean world famous actresses with quarter-billion-dollar net worths who have been in front of cameras since the cusp of adulthood and, in Kidman’s case, even before that. The lack of wrinkles in our lead actresses’ flawless visages may lead your brain to topics like lifestyle choices, hydration, the transformative power of make-up and digital touch-ups and hair dye, and whether all these anti-aging efforts overstep a line or create an all-encompassing war against time that cannot be won. Frankly, these topics got me thinking far more than anything in the narrative of Practical Magic 2 does, even with its tissue-targeted tackling of mortality with help from Fleetwood Mac, generic thoughts on true love, and hospital room C-storyline crumbs given to Sally’s perpetually-scrubbed near-doctor “other” daughter (Maisie Williams) and Aunt Frances (Stockard Channing).