Twenty-eight years after Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman first played the Owens sisters, Practical Magic has become something considerably bigger than the movie that arrived in theaters in 1998.
For generations of fans, it’s comfort viewing. It’s midnight margaritas, autumn in New England, sisterhood, romance and just enough witchcraft to make everything feel magical.
That creates an unusual challenge for Practical Magic 2.
Director Susanne Bier isn’t simply making a sequel. She’s returning to a world that viewers have spent nearly three decades remembering — and perhaps romanticizing — on their own.
Bullock and Kidman return as Sally and Gillian Owens, joined by Joey King and Maisie Williams as Sally’s now-grown daughters Kylie and Antonia. Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing are also back as beloved aunts Jet and Franny, while Lee Pace, Xolo Maridueña and Solly McLeod join the expanding Owens-family story.
The result doesn’t entirely recreate the peculiar spell of the original.
But whenever Bullock and Kidman are together, Practical Magic 2 remembers why audiences wanted to return in the first place.
A New Generation of Owens Women
Sally Owens has spent years trying to protect her daughters from the family’s magical inheritance.
Kylie and Antonia have grown into adulthood without truly understanding the world their mother came from — or the curse that has followed generations of Owens women.
That arrangement can’t last forever.
When Kylie’s relationship with Gideon (Xolo Maridueña) brings the family curse crashing back into their lives, Sally can no longer keep the truth buried.
Kylie learns that the stories she grew up hearing weren’t simply family folklore.
The Owens women really are witches.
And the curse is real.
Joey King becomes one of the sequel’s strongest additions because Kylie isn’t merely a younger replacement for Sally or Gillian. She’s discovering a family history everyone else has had decades to process, and King gives that realization an emotional urgency the movie badly needs.
Her response is also very Owens.
She decides she’s going to fix it.
That decision sends Kylie searching for answers while Sally and Gillian attempt to catch up with her before newfound magical abilities create an even bigger problem.
Warner Bros. describes the story as the Owens sisters confronting the dark curse threatening their family, with King, Williams, Pace, Maridueña, McLeod, Wiest and Channing joining Bullock and Kidman.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman Are Still the Real Magic
The easiest thing Practical Magic 2 could have done was turn Sally and Gillian into supporting characters while handing the franchise to a younger generation.
Thankfully, it doesn’t.
Bullock and Kidman remain the movie’s emotional center.
Sally is still the more cautious sister, except decades of loss have given that caution considerably more weight. She has spent much of her life trying to control the uncontrollable, and protecting Kylie and Antonia has become an extension of that instinct.
Gillian remains the counterweight.
Kidman gets to be looser and funnier, bringing some badly needed energy whenever the movie begins getting buried beneath its mythology.
The chemistry between them remains effortless.
They interrupt each other. They irritate each other. They understand each other without needing everything explained.
It feels like two sisters who have spent decades living inside the same complicated family history.
That’s important because nostalgia is simultaneously Practical Magic 2’s greatest asset and one of its biggest problems.
The movie knows exactly which memories fans brought with them.
Sometimes it leans on them too heavily.
Joey King Makes a Strong Addition to the Owens Family
King has the difficult job of joining a movie whose audience is primarily arriving to see Bullock and Kidman.
She handles it remarkably well.
Kylie inherits some of Sally’s emotional intensity without feeling like a copy of her mother. Her discovery of the Owens family’s history gives the sequel a legitimate reason to revisit ideas the original movie already explored.
King also brings enough vulnerability to Kylie that her impulsiveness makes sense.
She’s learning that an enormous part of her identity has been hidden from her. Her response isn’t always rational, but it shouldn’t be.
Unfortunately, Maisie Williams doesn’t get nearly as much material as Antonia.
That’s one of the sequel’s missed opportunities.
A movie built around generations of Owens sisters should have found more room to develop the relationship between Sally’s daughters alongside the relationship between Sally and Gillian.
Instead, Kylie becomes the primary engine of the younger-generation story.
King is good enough to carry that responsibility.
But the imbalance is noticeable.
Lee Pace Understands Exactly What Movie He’s In
Then there’s Lee Pace.
Pace plays Ian Wright, a British academic with considerable knowledge of the dark arts who becomes involved as Sally and Gillian search for Kylie.
He’s charming, mysterious and just theatrical enough for the world of Practical Magic.
Most importantly, Pace doesn’t treat the material as if he’s wandered into a deadly serious supernatural drama.
He understands the assignment.
Ian gives Bullock another personality to bounce against, and Pace generates enough chemistry with her that their scenes become some of the movie’s most enjoyable.
It’s also difficult not to wish the screenplay had made even more room for him.
Variety similarly singles out Pace’s screen presence and chemistry with Bullock while praising King as one of the sequel’s stronger performers.
Practical Magic 2 Is Too Long
The movie’s biggest problem is considerably less magical.
It’s 130 minutes long.
That’s a lot of Practical Magic.
The original ran roughly 105 minutes and already had an intentionally meandering quality. The sequel adds more mythology, another generation of Owens women, new characters and a much larger journey.
Not all of it earns the extra running time.
There are stretches where the story feels like it’s waiting for characters to catch up with information the audience has already figured out.
The screenplay from Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel also has a lot of supernatural mythology to explain, and some of that exposition drains energy from scenes that should feel lighter.
A tighter version of this movie probably works considerably better.
That criticism appears repeatedly across the early reviews. Variety describes the sequel as overlong and predictable, while AV Club argues that the expanded runtime and convoluted plotting diminish the charm that made the original so easy to revisit.
Leaving New England Costs the Movie Some of Its Magic
There’s another problem that’s harder to quantify.
The Owens house isn’t simply a location.
Neither is the New England setting.
They’re part of what people remember about Practical Magic.
The candles, old wood, autumn colors, kitchen conversations and slightly weathered coziness created a world viewers wanted to inhabit.
Practical Magic 2 expands its geography considerably, sending the characters across the Atlantic as the search for answers leads into England.
There are story reasons for doing that.
Visually, however, something is lost.
The movie becomes bigger while occasionally feeling less distinctive.
AV Club is particularly critical of that shift, arguing that abandoning the cozy New England aesthetic for colder locations removes one of the original movie’s secret weapons.
It’s difficult to disagree.
Sometimes the most magical place in Practical Magic isn’t another mysterious location.
It’s the Owens kitchen.
The Sisterhood Still Works
Where the sequel succeeds most reliably is in remembering that Practical Magic was never really about spells.
It was about women.
Sisters. Mothers. Daughters. Aunts.
The magic gave those relationships a supernatural vocabulary, but the emotional core was always the Owens women protecting one another.
Practical Magic 2 understands that.
Sally’s decision to hide magic from her daughters comes from fear rather than cruelty. Kylie wants to take control of a legacy she never chose. Gillian continues trying to pull Sally away from the instinct to shut herself off whenever life becomes frightening.
Jet and Franny’s return also gives the sequel a direct connection to the family history that shaped Sally and Gillian.
The movie doesn’t always give every member of the ensemble enough to do, particularly Williams, Wiest and Channing.
But simply having multiple generations of Owens women sharing the screen gives the story warmth.
That’s the ingredient no amount of elaborate mythology can replace.
Practical Magic 2 Works Best When It Stops Trying to Recreate 1998
Legacy sequels have an impossible assignment.
Audiences want something new.
They also want the thing they already love.
Practical Magic 2 sometimes struggles to decide which obligation matters more.
There are familiar callbacks, recognizable emotional beats and moments clearly designed to trigger memories of the original.
Some work.
Others feel like the movie checking items off a nostalgia list.
The better moments are the ones that allow these characters to exist in 2026 rather than constantly reminding us who they were in 1998.
Bullock and Kidman don’t need the movie to recreate their younger performances.
Watching Sally and Gillian navigate this stage of their lives is interesting enough.
Likewise, Kylie doesn’t need to become the new Sally.
The Owens family is large enough for another personality.
When Practical Magic 2 trusts that idea, the sequel finds some magic of its own.
Final Verdict
Practical Magic 2 isn’t the enchanting sequel fans may have spent nearly three decades imagining, but neither is it the cynical resurrection it could easily have become.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman remain the primary reason it works.
Their chemistry still gives Sally and Gillian’s relationship a lived-in warmth that no amount of magical mythology can manufacture. Joey King proves to be a worthy addition to the Owens family, while Lee Pace brings exactly the kind of charisma this world needs.
The problems are harder to ignore over 130 minutes.
The story is overstuffed, some potentially interesting characters are underserved, and leaving behind much of the cozy New England atmosphere makes portions of the sequel feel strangely disconnected from the movie audiences fell in love with.
Most frustratingly, Practical Magic 2 occasionally seems so determined to remind viewers why they loved Practical Magic that it forgets to give them enough new reasons to love this one.
Still, there’s comfort in seeing the Owens women together again.
For longtime fans, that may be enough to make this reunion worth accepting — imperfections, familiar spells and all.
Practical Magic 2
An overlong and overly nostalgic sequel that nevertheless finds enough warmth in Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman’s enduring chemistry to make returning to the Owens family worthwhile.
The quieter Sally-and-Gillian exchanges that allow Bullock and Kidman’s natural chemistry to do more work than any elaborate spell or supernatural explanation.
Joey King makes Kylie feel like a genuine addition to the Owens family rather than simply a next-generation replacement for the characters audiences already love.
Bullock and Kidman’s sisterly chemistry, King’s emotional commitment, Lee Pace’s considerable charm and the movie’s continued emphasis on generations of Owens women protecting one another.
At 130 minutes, the sequel is too long and too dependent on familiar callbacks, while several members of its excellent ensemble aren’t given nearly enough to do.
Where to Watch Practical Magic 2
Practical Magic 2 opened exclusively in theaters in North America on September 11, 2026. The Warner Bros. Pictures sequel stars Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Lee Pace and Maisie Williams.
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Thomas Miller is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Seat42F, covering television, movies and streaming entertainment. He launched Seat42F in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades covering the entertainment industry.
