Practical Magic 2 opens to a sharp critic-audience split as Warner Bros. leans on Bullock and Kidman

"Practical Magic 2" opened in U.S. theaters Friday, reuniting Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the Owens sisters 28 years after the original became a cult favorite despite a lukewarm critical reception in 1998. The sequel arrives with a similar split: a 35 percent critics' score against a 92 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the widest critic-audience gaps of the year, and it lands at a moment when Warner Bros. badly needs a hit.

Directed by Susanne Bier and based on Alice Hoffman's 2021 novel "The Book of Magic," the third installment of Hoffman's Practical Magic series, the film brings back Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing as aunts Frances and Jet alongside a new cast that includes Joey King, Lee Pace, Maisie Williams and Xolo Maridueña. The studio's official film page describes it as a continuation rather than a remake of the original story, following the Owens family a generation later, a premise Warner Bros. previewed through its official trailer released earlier this summer.

A strong preview night, a cautious weekend forecast

Thursday preview screenings across roughly 3,200 locations brought in $4.7 million, according to industry trackers, outperforming comparable recent Bullock vehicles such as "The Lost City" and "Ticket to Paradise." Warner Bros. is projecting a four-day domestic opening in the $30 million to $35 million range on the film's $75 million budget, with some independent trackers putting the ceiling closer to $40 million, a figure reported by TheWrap's box office analysis.

The number matters beyond one weekend. Warner Bros. has not had a single $100 million domestic grosser so far in 2026, the studio's weakest year at the North American box office since 2001, according to the same trade analysis. "Practical Magic 2" was built, in part, to be an answer to that drought: two A-list female leads carrying a mid-budget original-ish property, rather than an established franchise or comic-book property, at a moment when six-week box-office leader "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" has otherwise dominated the year's conversation.

Two stars, one very different set of instructions from the director

Bier, whose credits include "The Night Manager" and "The Undoing," told the Irish Times she had never seen the original "Practical Magic" before being approached for the sequel — and that watching it changed her sense of what she was inheriting. "I hadn't seen it until I was approached about a sequel. Only then I watched it and loved it," she said in an interview published ahead of the release.

"The energy between the two of them is incredible, because they really stimulate, challenge and enjoy each other," Bier said of directing Bullock and Kidman together. "It's very different with the two of them together, because the effect isn't doubled. It's multiplied by 10 or something."

Hoffman, who wrote the novel the film draws from, stepped back from adapting her own book for the screen, telling interviewers the process required a kind of distance she found harder to manage with her own material than with past screenwriting work: "It's funny because I was a screenwriter for many years, but with this — with my own work — it's definitely harder," she said, adding that "a book is going to be different than the movie. It just needs to be." Bier, who has no sisters of her own, said the film's central theme was one she approached from the outside: "I don't have a sister, so the sisterhood thing was something that I was kind of invited into, and which I really thoroughly enjoyed."

The soundtrack, and the marketing machine behind it

Composer Rupert Gregson-Williams, reuniting with Bier after their work together on "The Perfect Couple," scored the film for WaterTower Music. The 20-track soundtrack, released digitally the same day as the film, includes three new original songs from Bleachers, Brandi Carlile and Aldae, plus a Carlile cover of Billy Joel's "And So It Goes." "His music has so much heart, but he's also quite versatile," Bier said of the score. "It needed to be both huge and intimate." Bullock, also a credited executive producer on the film, put the balance more simply: "You have visual storytelling, and then there's musical storytelling."

Industry press has framed the release as part of a broader wave of nostalgia-driven sequels reaching back to films from the late 1990s and early 2000s, betting that audiences who grew up with the originals will turn out for their adult sequels even when reviews are mixed. The 92 percent audience score suggests that bet may be paying off among the people the studio most needed to reach, even as the 35 percent critics' score points to a genuine split over whether a legacy sequel arriving nearly three decades later can recapture what made the original a slow-building cult hit in the first place.

What's next

"Practical Magic 2" expands into the United Kingdom and other international markets on September 18. Warner Bros. will report official opening-weekend figures early next week, a number the studio and outside trackers alike are treating as an early signal for how the rest of its 2026 fall slate is likely to perform. Awards consideration for the film itself is considered a long shot given its critical reception, though craft categories such as score and costume design remain plausible if narrower conversations as the season develops.

For Warner Bros., the calculation is straightforward even if the reviews are not: a studio that has gone the better part of a year without a breakout domestic hit needs proof that mid-budget, star-driven films built around returning audiences — rather than existing franchises or comic-book intellectual property — can still open. A four-day figure in the $30 million to $40 million range on a $75 million budget would not make "Practical Magic 2" a blockbuster in the modern sense, but combined with strong home-video and streaming performance, it could be enough to validate the format for future legacy sequels the studio has in earlier stages of development.