Practical Magic 2 Review: The Owens Sisters Return, But the Spell Doesn't Quite Hold
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are back 27 years later for a legacy sequel that critics found nostalgic but inert, even as a new generation — Joey King, Lee Pace, Maisie Williams — tries to carry the franchise forward.
Twenty-seven years is a long time to wait for a sequel, and Practical Magic 2 wears that gap openly: it's less a continuation of the 1998 film's plot than a passing of the torch, built from Alice Hoffman's 2021 novel The Book of Magic rather than the original film's own source material. Susanne Bier directs a script credited to three writers — Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel — working from a premise that has to do double duty: satisfy the audience that made the original a slow-burn cult classic on cable and home video, while introducing a new generation of Owens women who can plausibly carry the franchise if Warner Bros. wants more.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as Sally and Gillian Owens, alongside Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing reprising their aunts Jet and Frances — the film's biggest asset, according to nearly every review, is simply watching this cast share scenes again. Joey King plays Sally's daughter Kylie, whose inherited entanglement with the family's centuries-old loveless curse drives the actual plot, with Lee Pace, Maisie Williams, and Xolo Maridueña rounding out a new-generation cast clearly positioned as the franchise's future.
That's also where the reviews turn skeptical. Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus describes the film as "nostalgic and inert," praising the chemistry between the returning leads while faulting what it calls "mechanical plotting" — a sense that the film is retracing the emotional beats of the original rather than finding new ones. At 130 minutes, several reviewers noted the film takes its time getting to conflict that the first Practical Magic handled more efficiently in two-thirds the runtime.
Not every critic came away cold: TL;DR Movie Reviews gave it four out of five stars, writing that "the sequel improves on the narrative while bringing the charm in spades," and Loud and Clear Reviews called it "a spellbinding sequel on love, spells, midnight margaritas, and everything in between." The split is real, not just a headline simplification — this is a film with genuine defenders, just not a consensus behind it.
The numbers land right in the middle of that disagreement: a 36% Tomatometer from 163 critics (5.0/10 average), a Metacritic score of 44 ("mixed or average" from 41 critics), and a 6.4/10 on IMDb. A CinemaScore of B+ and a 72% PostTrak recommend rate suggest opening-weekend audiences — likely skewing toward existing fans who showed up specifically for Bullock and Kidman — were considerably warmer on it than the critics reviewing it cold.
That audience-critic gap matters more than usual here because of what the film is visibly trying to do: hand off a beloved but dormant property to a cast (King, Pace, Williams, Maridueña) who could plausibly anchor future installments. Critics who found the legacy-sequel template familiar — retelling rather than extending the original's story to court a younger fanbase — are describing a real structural choice, not just a matter of taste.
Commercially, the film has grossed $92.4 million worldwide against a reported $75 million budget — a profit on paper, but a modest one for a legacy sequel to a genuine cult classic with 27 years of built-in nostalgia and two A-list leads, and short of what a starker franchise-relaunch success story would look like.
Practical Magic 2 works best as comfort food for people who already loved the Owens sisters, and it's honest about being exactly that rather than pretending to be something sharper. Whether it did enough to also launch Kylie's generation as a going concern is the question Warner Bros. will actually have to answer, and the reviews suggest that's still genuinely unresolved.