Practical Magic 2 Review: A Cozy Reunion That Can’t Quite Rekindle the Old Spark

Filmoria Review

Practical Magic 2 Review: A Cozy Reunion That Can’t Quite Rekindle the Old Spark

Official poster © Warner Bros. Pictures, via TMDB.

Quick Facts

• Director: Susanne Bier
• Cast: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Maisie Williams, Lee Pace, Dianne Wiest, Stockard Channing, Xolo Maridueña, Solly McLeod
• Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
• Release Date: September 11, 2026
• Genre: Fantasy, Comedy, Drama

A Sequel Nobody Was Really Asking For — Until They Were

Worth remembering: the original Practical Magic flopped when it opened in 1998. It cost roughly $75 million, barely made that back worldwide, and critics of the era were not kind to it. What it built instead, slowly and almost by accident, was a devoted audience on cable reruns, then VHS, then DVD, then whichever streaming service happened to be carrying it that year. People describe finding this movie “at a sleepover” or “on TV one rainy Sunday” more often than they describe seeing it in a theater. That word-of-mouth afterlife is exactly why a sequel a quarter-century later doesn’t feel like the cynical cash grab it could have been on paper. Warner Bros. is betting on nostalgia that’s had decades to compound, plus two lead actresses whose stardom has only grown since.

The film picks up the Owens family in the present day. Sally (Sandra Bullock) has spent the years since trying, as she always does, to keep magic at arm’s length and her daughters’ lives ordinary. That containment effort collapses when Kylie (Joey King) — now an adult, and clearly her mother’s daughter whether she likes it or not — starts manifesting abilities darker and more volatile than anything the family has dealt with before. Sally’s younger daughter Antonia (Maisie Williams) and her sister Gillian (Nicole Kidman) get pulled back in, and eventually so do the wonderfully unbothered aunts, Jet and Frances (Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, both clearly having a great time being back). The plot sends the family from Massachusetts to the United Kingdom hunting for the source of the Owens curse, which is a geographically convenient excuse for some gorgeous location photography and a noticeably bigger budget than the original ever got.

Director Susanne Bier, taking over from Griffin Dunne, is a curious choice, though not an unwelcome one. She’s spent her career moving between prestige drama (In a Better World) and glossy limited series (The Undoing), and she brings a confident hand to the family-melodrama backbone of the story. The film is at its best in quiet two-handers between sisters, or between mother and daughter, where Bullock and Kidman don’t need much dialogue to sell twenty-five years of unspoken history. Where it runs into trouble is tone. The 1998 original had a slightly ragged, lived-in quality: candlelit kitchens, off-kilter needle-drops, a sense that this family’s magic was inconvenient and a little embarrassing as often as it was wondrous. This sequel, by contrast, is extremely polished. Scenes are lit like a prestige streaming drama. It’s a look that suits Bier’s other work fine, but sits oddly on a story that’s supposed to feel handmade and eccentric.

That tension between old and new runs through the whole film. Individually, the new cast members fare well. Joey King brings real anguish to Kylie’s fear of losing control of her own powers, and Lee Pace, playing a British occultist who may know more about the family curse than he’s letting on, has the kind of easy screen charisma that makes underwritten material go down smoother than it should. But the film is oddly stingy with scenes that let all three generations of Owens women actually occupy the same space together. Given that sisterhood and inherited womanhood are the whole thematic engine of this franchise, it’s a strange thing to shortchange, and it’s probably the single biggest reason the back half feels busier than it does resonant.

The curse-breaking plot itself is serviceable rather than special. There’s a family secret, a centuries-old wrong that needs righting, a ticking clock tied to a lunar event, and a final-act set piece in a crumbling English manor delivering the expected sparks-and-candlelight spectacle without doing much new with it. Genre-savvy viewers will call most of the twists a scene or two before they land. What elevates the back half above pure formula is the cast, again — specifically Bullock and Kidman playing Sally and Gillian as genuinely tired, imperfect middle-aged women instead of glamorous witches performing feistiness for the camera. There’s a scene late in the film where Sally admits, more or less, that she’s been a controlling mother out of fear rather than malice, and Bullock underplays it beautifully. Better moment than the script around it deserves.

Then there’s the soundtrack, doing a lot of the film’s emotional heavy lifting and mostly succeeding at it. Stevie Nicks was practically a co-star in the first film, and this sequel leans into that legacy directly: new Stevie Nicks material sits alongside contributions from a lineup of female artists including Lana Del Rey, stitched through the key emotional beats. Whether the connection is earned by the story or just borrowed from a well-chosen needle-drop is a fair question. Either way, it works in the moment.

Where the film loses the most goodwill is in a screenplay that leans on cliché more than it should. Characters often explain to each other, and by extension to us, what family and sisterhood and self-acceptance mean, in lines that needed a trim or two. A subplot involving Kylie’s love interest (Xolo Maridueña) feels bolted on, there mainly to give the marketing something for the trailer rather than because the story needed it. And the England detour, while visually lush, stretches the midsection past the point of urgency — at just over two hours, this is a good fifteen to twenty minutes longer than its material justifies.

None of which means the film doesn’t work, in its way. Watching Bullock, Kidman, Wiest, and Channing occupy the same kitchen again, bickering and casting spells and drinking midnight margaritas, has a real warmth to it that a more cynical legacy sequel wouldn’t have bothered earning. For an audience that’s spent twenty-five years returning to the original the way you’d return to a favorite blanket, that reunion energy alone may be worth the ticket. This is a film that understands what people loved about its predecessor even when it can’t quite recapture how that predecessor actually felt to watch: too polished where the original was scrappy, too eager to explain where the original trusted you to feel it.

Where It Fits in the Fall Season

Warner Bros. has slotted this one right at the front edge of the autumn “cozy season” window, the same September-into-October stretch that horror and witchy-adjacent films have increasingly claimed for themselves in recent years. Smart counter-programming against the bigger tentpole action releases still dominating multiplexes, and it plays directly to the original’s core audience: viewers who associate the Owens sisters with sweater weather, falling leaves, and a very specific kind of autumnal comfort-watching. Early tracking suggests a modest but healthy opening, more in line with a steady word-of-mouth performer than a blockbuster front-loader, which, fittingly, is roughly the shape of the original’s two-decade box office story in reverse. Whether this sequel earns a similar long tail on streaming remains to be seen, though the cast alone should guarantee it a long shelf life in nostalgia rotation.

Worth noting how the film handles its supporting bench, too. Lee Pace’s occultist antagonist-slash-ally is left with an ending ambiguous enough that a third installment clearly isn’t off the table, and Warner Bros. has been coy in press notes about “expanding the world of the Owens family,” which reads, unmistakably, as a soft pitch for a trilogy. Given how well this cast plays together on screen, that wouldn’t be the worst outcome, provided the eventual script trusts them with better material than this one occasionally does.

The Verdict

Practical Magic 2 is a well-cast, good-hearted legacy sequel coasting more on the goodwill of its returning stars than on the strength of its own storytelling. It’s unlikely to build the kind of slow-burn cult devotion its predecessor did, mostly because it doesn’t leave enough rough edges for an audience to fall in love with over multiple rewatches. Fans of the original should still see it, ideally with the people they’d want next to them on that hypothetical rainy Sunday. Just don’t expect the same spell to hold.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Practical Magic 2 a direct sequel to the 1998 film?
Yes. It’s set roughly 25 years later and follows Sally and Gillian Owens, along with Sally’s adult daughters, as a new magical crisis brings the family back together.

Do Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman both return?
Yes, both reprise their roles as Sally and Gillian Owens, alongside Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing as Aunts Jet and Frances.

Is Practical Magic 2 worth watching if you haven’t seen the original?
It’s watchable on its own, but the emotional payoff depends heavily on affection for the first film’s characters, so first-timers should ideally watch the original beforehand.

Where was Practical Magic 2 filmed?
Production combined US locations with a UK shoot, reflecting the plot’s journey from Massachusetts to England in search of the source of the family curse.

Is there a post-credits scene or sequel setup?
The film leaves its central antagonist’s fate deliberately open-ended, widely read as a soft setup for a potential third installment.

Poster image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures / TMDB, used for editorial review purposes.