28 years passed for the Owens sisters. 26 passed for us.
Practical Magic 2 arrives 28 years after the original — and critics disagree about what the gap bought.
By The Weekend · · 6 min read
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are back as the Owens sisters 28 years after "Practical Magic" failed at the box office and found its audience anyway, on cable and Halloween rewatch lists. The sequel arrives with three reviews split almost evenly: one calls it "spellbinding," another finds "warm seasonal pleasures," a third tells lifelong fans to stay away. That spread is the actual story — not the plot, which barely holds together, but what happens when a cult flop gets a nostalgia-era sequel nobody asked for out loud.
The first film lost money. That's why the second one exists.
"Practical Magic" was not a hit in 1998. Critics were unkind, and it did not recoup its budget theatrically. What it did instead was accumulate an audience slowly, over two decades of cable reruns and streaming licensing, until it became — per IndieWire's framing — a millennial-women Halloween comfort watch, the kind of film people schedule around rather than stumble into. That slow-burn afterlife is precisely the asset a studio can price into a sequel greenlight: a built-in audience with two decades of goodwill and zero recent box-office data to contradict it. The theatrical failure isn't a footnote to the sequel's existence. It's the mechanism. A movie that flopped and then got beloved anyway is a better sequel bet than a movie that simply hit — because the flop years filtered out casual viewers and left only people who will show up specifically because it's this film, not just because it's witchy October content.
Susanne Bier replaces Griffin Dunne, and the tone follows her, not the original writer
Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the 1998 script, returns for the sequel alongside Georgia Pritchett ("Succession," "Veep") and Kelly Marcel (a "Cruella" credit). But the director's chair changed hands, from Griffin Dunne to Susanne Bier, and both reviews that actually praise the film credit her specifically for making it "touching" and "warm and wry" rather than simply nostalgic. The Guardian's review, by contrast, reads as ambivalent about the whole project — "strange and messy," a phrase it applies to both films equally, as if consistency of flaw is itself a kind of achievement. The disagreement isn't really about plot holes. It's about whether doubling down on the original's "hairpin tonal turns" and "strange CGI flourishes" — the Guardian's own description — reads as fidelity or as a director unable to modernize a format built for 1998 sincerity.
The timeline math doesn't work, and both critics who checked it noticed
Here is the detail that both major reviews flag independently, which is itself telling: the original film is explicitly dated to March 1998 by a character's own line of dialogue, but the sequel's headstones place those events in the early 2000s. The gap matters because of who it protects. Bullock and Kidman are both older now than Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest were playing the aunts in the original — but the script needs Joey King and Maisie Williams, playing the now-grown daughters, to read as early-20s rather than mid-30s, which their real ages would demand under the original timeline. Shifting the decade buys the film cover for casting continuity over aging accuracy. It's a small fudge with a specific beneficiary: not the plot, but the marketing image of stars who need to look like they're playing believable ingenues opposite believable mothers. The Guardian calls this "irksome if you are timeline-sensitive." It is also, quietly, the entire logic of how legacy-sequel casting gets solved when nobody wants to recast the leads.
Two Oscar winners, a coma curse, and a magic system that still won't let anyone fly a suitcase
The plot mechanics are worth stating plainly, because they explain the tonal whiplash both positive reviews forgive and the negative one doesn't. Sally (Bullock) believed she'd broken her family's generational curse — the one that kills any man an Owens woman truly loves — at the end of the first film. She hadn't: her second husband died within a few years, and she responded by magically erasing her daughters' memories of magic altogether, a solution that reads less like protection and more like intergenerational avoidance dressed up as spellcraft. When one daughter's boyfriend, Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), ends up cursed into a coma, the plot sends Kylie (King) fleeing to England with a newly discovered "Book of the Raven," pursued by her mother and aunt. The internal logic of the magic system is oddly rigid for a film this baggy tonally — coffee cups stir themselves automatically, but suitcases require actual lugging across three separate scenes, an inconsistency the Guardian singles out as evidence the world-building was never meant to survive close scrutiny. That's not a flaw exactly. It's the same permissive-but-arbitrary rule-making that let the original mix a courtroom murder investigation with a margarita dance number and call the mixture a genre.
What "spellbinding" and "avoid it" are actually disagreeing about
IndieWire's review is the most enthusiastic of the three, framing the film as outperforming recent legacy-sequel peers like "Freakier Friday" and "The Devil Wears Prada 2" — a comparison that matters because it locates "Practical Magic 2" inside a specific 2025-26 trend of studios reviving female-led '90s and 2000s comfort films rather than treating it as a standalone bet. The Guardian's review sits in the middle, praising "warm seasonal pleasures" while flagging the same structural problems — the timeline, the CGI, the tonal lurches — as unresolved rather than charming. The techradar.com piece, by contrast, tells longtime fans of the original to skip it outright, though its own snippet offers no specific reasoning beyond the warning itself. What that three-way split actually reveals is that this film has no consensus read on whether nostalgia execution earns forgiveness for structural sloppiness — the same argument critics have now had, in some form, over "Freakier Friday" and "The Devil Wears Prada 2" this same year. The pattern is becoming a genre of its own: legacy sequels that reviewers grade less on craft than on whether the reunion itself justifies the ninety minutes.
The aunt who steals the film gets the least screen time to do it
Both full reviews single out Maisie Williams's performance as Antonia — inheriting a role recast from the original film's timeline math — as a highlight left underused once the plot ships Sally and Gillian off to chase Kylie in England. Stockard Channing, playing the aunt, is described by the Guardian as "the film's most luminous screen presence," a compliment paired directly with the observation that she and Williams get sidelined once the central sisters take over the back half of the story. That's a structural choice, not an accident: a sequel built to re-sell two Oscar winners' reunion chemistry has an incentive to keep the camera on Bullock and Kidman even when the supporting cast is doing more interesting work. Whether that trade pays off is, by the critics' own account, still undecided — which is a more honest verdict than any single star rating would give you.