Practical Magic Flopped in 1998. Twenty-Eight Years Later, Its Sequel Opened at No. 1 on Nostalgia Alone

I have a soft spot for stories like this one, because they're rarer than they should be. Most legacy sequels get greenlit off a franchise that never really left — a superhero universe, a toy aisle, something that's been quietly making money the whole time. Practical Magic isn't that. It was a genuine box office disappointment in October 1998, the kind of movie that opened soft, got shrugged off by critics, and only became beloved years later because it kept turning up on cable every October until an entire generation decided it was a comfort watch. That's the film Warner Bros. just built a $75 million sequel around, and this past weekend, it worked.

The detail that makes this opening actually remarkable

Practical Magic 2 reunites Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, alongside returning cast members Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, with Joey King, Lee Pace, Maisie Williams, and Xolo Maridueña joining as the story follows a curse threatening the Owens family just as a younger generation starts coming into its own power. Susanne Bier directs from a script pulling on Alice Hoffman's 2021 novel "The Book of Magic," the literary sequel to the original 1995 book the first film was based on. It opened domestically to an estimated $30 million from 4,146 theaters — a $13 million Friday that included $4.7 million in Thursday previews — and added $16 million from 77 international markets for a $46 million worldwide start, enough to bump Spider-Man: Brand New Day out of the No. 1 spot it had held for six consecutive weekends.

Here's the number I keep coming back to, though. The original Practical Magic opened in October 1998 to a three-day weekend of just $13.1 million, on its way to a modest $94.4 million total off a reported $60 to 75 million budget — a movie that limped through its theatrical run before word of mouth and years of cable reruns turned Sally and Gillian Owens into comfort-watch icons. The sequel's opening day alone, $13 million, landed almost exactly where the entire original opening weekend did nearly three decades earlier. It's a strange kind of full-circle marker: the built-in audience an unloved cult movie can quietly accumulate over 28 years turned out to be worth almost as much, in a single day, as the theatrical run that almost buried the franchise before it began.

Critics and audiences are not watching the same movie

The reception split is where this story gets genuinely interesting, because it isn't a small gap. Practical Magic 2 sits at 37% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes as of Sunday morning, but a 92% audience score on the site's Popcornmeter, a 4.5-out-of-5 on PostTrak, and a B+ CinemaScore pulled from opening-weekend crowds — actually an improvement on the original film's B- back in 1998, for whatever that's worth to people keeping score across decades. The Associated Press gave it two out of four stars, describing a sequel that trades away some of the original's campy fun but leans on the genuine chemistry Bullock and Kidman still have together, and that basically captures the split running through most of the reviews I've read: critics wanted something sharper or stranger, and the audience mostly just wanted these two actors back in the same kitchen again, casting spells and bickering like sisters.

The audience data backs that up in a way that's a little unusual to see spelled out. Tracking firm RelishMix reported that four of the film's eight billed cast members were driving most of the pre-release buzz, led by Joey King with 36.6 million social followers, ahead of Nicole Kidman at 25.9 million, Xolo Maridueña at 10.1 million, Maisie Williams at 9.8 million, and Sandra Bullock at 5.5 million — meaning a good chunk of the audience walking in this weekend was there for the newer, younger cast as much as the nostalgia play, even if Bullock and Kidman are still the names on the poster. Overall turnout skewed heavily female, 69% women over 25, with online word of mouth landing at a solid 8.2 out of 10 per RelishMix, which lines up with an opening that came in at the lower end of pre-release forecasts but still comfortably won the weekend.

What the Owens sisters are up against next

A $46 million global opening on a $75 million budget is a solid start, not a victory lap, and Warner Bros. knows it. The film arrived during what industry trackers are calling a sluggish post-Labor Day frame, with the overall weekend box office running about 10% below the same period last year and no other new release clearing $10 million. That context actually helps Practical Magic 2's case a little: it won a quiet weekend clearly and cleanly, without another major release around to split the audience it drew. The real test now is whether that 92% audience score translates into the kind of holding power original movies need once the nostalgia-driven opening crowd has already come and gone, especially with a $75 million budget split 50/50 between Warner Bros. and Alcon Entertainment that will need solid multiples, not just a good first weekend, to look like a win by the time the run is over.