Twenty-eight years after a pair of witch sisters first turned midnight margaritas into a dance party, the Owens family is back. Practical Magic 2 materialized in theaters yesterday, September 9, 2026, and it arrives carrying a burden heavier than any family curse: the expectations of an entire generation that grew up quoting the original. The good news is that director Susanne Bier, taking the reins from Griffin Dunne, understands exactly what made the 1998 film endure. The better news is that she has something new to say with it.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as Sally and Gillian Owens, now decades older and, if not wiser, at least more tired. The film opens in the same coastal Massachusetts town of the first movie, though the Owens house has grown quieter. Sally has settled into something resembling peace, running a small apothecary and pretending her magic is behind her. Gillian, meanwhile, has spent the intervening years chasing one disastrous romance after another, each one ending with a little more of her sparkle chipped away. When a long-dormant curse resurfaces - the same dark inheritance that has haunted the Owens women for centuries - the sisters must finally confront it together, not as the young women who once fled their fate, but as middle-aged ones who thought they had already paid their dues.
Bullock and Kidman slip back into their roles with an ease that suggests they never really left. There is a lived-in rhythm to their banter now, a shorthand that only comes from decades of shared history both on and off screen. The film wisely gives them room to be messy and unglamorous in ways the original only hinted at. When Sally snaps at Gillian for treating her own life like a costume she can discard, the sting lands because we believe these women have been having this argument, in one form or another, since childhood.
The new additions hold their own. Joey King plays Kylie, Sally's daughter, now a young woman wrestling with the same magical inheritance her mother spent years suppressing. Maisie Williams is Antonia, Gillian's daughter, whose quiet intensity suggests she has inherited more from her aunt than anyone expected. Xolo Maridueña brings warmth and a hint of danger as Gideon, a stranger whose connection to the Owens bloodline is not immediately clear. Lee Pace, as Ian Wright, a skeptical local historian, provides both romantic friction and the film's funniest moments of mundane disbelief.
As Aunt Jet and Aunt Frances, Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing remain the film's secret weapon. They appear less frequently than fans might like, but every scene they inhabit crackles with the same irreverent energy that made them scene-stealers nearly three decades ago. A late sequence in which the aunts deliver a warning about the curse with the casual air of women discussing a bad weather forecast is worth the price of admission alone.
Bier, working from a screenplay that balances domestic comedy with genuine supernatural dread, keeps the tone shifting gracefully. The film is not afraid to sit in uncomfortable silences, particularly in its middle act, when the sisters realize that breaking the curse may require a sacrifice neither is willing to name out loud. The romance elements, while present, take a back seat to the relationship between Sally and Gillian, which feels like the correct choice. The fantasy sequences are more restrained than the original's, trading flashy effects for atmosphere and suggestion. At 130 minutes, the film occasionally sags, particularly in a subplot involving Gideon's origins that could have been trimmed without losing much.
Practical Magic 2 opened to a middling 6.5 out of 10 on TMDb, a rating that suggests audiences are divided. Some will find its slower, more contemplative pace a betrayal of the original's fizzy charm. Others will appreciate that Bier has made a film about what happens after the happy ending, when the curse is still there and the margaritas have lost their fizz. It is a romance, a fantasy, and a comedy, but it is also something rarer: a sequel that respects its audience enough to let them age alongside its characters.
The Owens sisters are not trying to escape their fate anymore. They are trying to understand it. That shift, from defiance to acceptance, gives Practical Magic 2 a weight the original never attempted. Whether that is what audiences want from a late-summer witch comedy is an open question. But it is a risk worth taking.
