Practical Magic 2 Is What Happens When Audiences Refuse to Let a Movie Die

Hollywood knows what to do when a movie is a hit.

Make another one.

Preferably quickly, before everybody involved gets older, the audience moves on, or somebody has to explain why a movie that supposedly demanded a sequel has been sitting untouched for 12 years.

Practical Magic took a different route.

It took 28 years.

When the original movie arrived in October 1998, it opened at No. 1 domestically with about $13.1 million and eventually earned roughly $47 million in North America.

But it wasn’t received like the beginning of an enduring franchise.

Critics complained about its shifting tone and its mixture of romance, comedy, supernatural horror and family drama. Apparently, nobody could quite agree on what sort of movie it was supposed to be.

Nearly three decades later, Rotten Tomatoes captures the disagreement rather neatly.

The site currently has Practical Magic at 30 percent from critics and 73 percent from audiences.

There’s an even better measurement available now.

As of Sept. 6, Practical Magic is No. 3 on JustWatch’s U.S. daily streaming movie chart. JustWatch currently lists the movie as streaming on HBO Max, along with availability through several live-TV and channel services.

That’s a 28-year-old movie sitting near the top of a streaming chart.

And on Sept. 10, according to Warner Bros., Practical Magic 2 arrives in North American theaters.

Apparently the audience won.

The first verdict didn’t stick

Bullock hasn’t forgotten what happened the first time around.

While promoting Practical Magic 2, she has talked about going into the original believing they had made something audiences would embrace. Instead, the reception hurt. She has described that promotional run as difficult and said she was saddened by the reaction.

Then something changed.

Not immediately.

People simply kept finding the movie.

Kidman has described what happened afterward as a grassroots revival. The film developed the kind of audience that doesn’t disappear once the theatrical posters come down. People rewatched it. Shared it. Made it part of their fall viewing. Passed it to somebody else.

Eventually, calling Practical Magic a cult classic almost undersells what happened.

Four days before its sequel arrives, the original is one of the most-streamed movies in the country according to JustWatch.

That’s not nostalgia existing in theory.

People are still watching the thing.

Practical Magic didn’t become less weird. We just stopped asking it to pick a lane.

The interesting thing about watching the reputation of Practical Magic change is that the movie itself didn’t change.

It’s still weird.

There is romance. There are witches. There is domestic abuse, a corpse, eccentric aunts, a curse, possession, comedy and an unusually aggressive soundtrack.

Roger Ebert’s original review criticized the film for struggling to settle on a consistent tone. Reviews in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post had similar problems with its mixture of styles.

But maybe that inability to fit comfortably into one box is part of why it lasted.

Practical Magic isn’t purely horror, so it doesn’t have to wait for somebody to want horror.

It isn’t purely a romantic comedy.

It isn’t simply a witch movie.

It can be a Halloween movie without really being a Halloween movie at all.

Movies that are difficult to categorize can be difficult to market.

They’re sometimes remarkably easy to revisit.

Now the sequel has to deal with 28 years of affection

Warner Bros. isn’t pretending those 28 years didn’t happen.

Bullock and Kidman return as Sally and Gillian Owens, with Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing also returning. Joey King, Maisie Williams and Lee Pace are among the new additions to the cast.

Warner Bros. credits Susanne Bier as director, with the story drawing from Alice Hoffman’s 2021 novel The Book of Magic. Bullock and Kidman are producers as well.

More importantly, Sally and Gillian aren’t being pulled out of 1998 and dropped into another adventure.

Bullock and Kidman have talked about returning to these characters after becoming mothers, experiencing loss and living nearly three more decades themselves. The Owens family has gotten older too, and the sequel carries its story into another generation.

Even the music is being treated carefully.

Producer Denise Di Novi has said Bullock became heavily involved in shaping the sequel’s soundtrack. That makes sense. The first movie’s music, including Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow, became one of those pieces of Practical Magic that fans carried with them long after its theatrical run.

There is a danger here, of course.

A cult following does not automatically mean a sequel is a good idea.

Sometimes what people love about an older movie is tied precisely to the time in which it was made. The actors, the clothes, the music, the production design and even the filmmaking imperfections become part of the thing people remember.

Hollywood has gotten remarkably good at identifying affection.

It has not always been as good at understanding why that affection exists.

Practical Magic 2 still has to prove that it has something to offer beyond the pleasure of seeing Bullock and Kidman standing next to each other again.

But at least this sequel can answer one question that hangs over almost every long-delayed revival:

Who wanted this?

We know who wanted this.

The people who never stopped watching the first one.

Opening weekend isn’t the end of a movie anymore

This is the part of the Practical Magic story that matters most from where KazooWatch sits.

Opening weekends still matter. Reviews matter. Box-office totals matter.

But they’re not the end of the story anymore.

A movie can miss its moment in theaters and spend years finding exactly the people who respond to it. It can move through cable, VHS and DVD, digital purchase and streaming, meeting another audience every time somebody presses Play.

Streaming just makes that long life much easier to see.

Sometimes it happens quietly. A movie becomes part of people’s annual routines without anybody announcing that it happened.

And sometimes, 28 years later, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman end up making another movie because of it.

Practical Magic 2 doesn’t rewrite what happened to Practical Magic in 1998. The reviews still exist. The box-office numbers haven’t changed.

The audience simply kept voting.

One rental.

One DVD.

One October rewatch.

One streaming click at a time.

Eventually Hollywood counted the votes.

And this week, the Owens sisters are back.