Practical Magic 2 Box Office: Witches Set to End Spider-Man’s Six-Week Reign

Spider-Man has owned the box office for six straight weekends. On Thursday night, two witches from Massachusetts started pushing him toward the exit.

Practical Magic 2 conjured close to $5 million in Thursday previews, per Deadline’s updated tally, with Variety reporting $4.7 million from showtimes that began at 2 p.m. That is a strong start for a sequel to a movie that flopped in 1998, and it has Warner Bros. tracking a domestic debut in the $30 million to $40 million range from roughly 4,000 theaters.

If that holds, the Owens sisters take the top spot on the chart this weekend and end the six-week reign of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Not bad for a film whose leads are 62 and 59, in a market that spent most of the summer chasing teenagers.

A Preview Night That Beat Every Comparison

The Thursday number is more impressive when you line it up against the films it is being measured against. Sandra Bullock’s own 2022 romantic adventure The Lost City opened on $2.5 million in previews and turned that into a $31 million weekend. The George Clooney and Julia Roberts reunion Ticket to Paradise managed $1.1 million in previews and a $16.5 million opening. Warner Bros.’ own Wuthering Heights pulled $3 million on its Thursday and converted it into $32.8 million.

Practical Magic 2 beat all three. Deadline reported showtimes starting at 2 p.m., with premium large formats in the mix, including Dolby Cinema. Warner Bros. is playing the numbers conservatively, projecting $30 million to $35 million domestically, while independent tracking has floated $40 million.

Overseas, Variety pegs the international start at $18 million to $25 million from 77 territories, not including China. The film cost a reported $70 million to $75 million to produce, with Alcon financing half the bill alongside Warner Bros.

Twenty-Eight Years of Midnight Margaritas

The sequel exists because of a very specific kind of fandom. The 1998 original opened at No. 1 with $13.1 million and finished its run with $46.7 million domestic and $94.4 million worldwide. Critics were not fans, and audiences handed it a B- CinemaScore.

Then it refused to die. The film became a sleepover staple and a DVD and streaming favorite, the kind of movie that gets quoted in October and rewatched every autumn. Kidman and Bullock’s chemistry, the margarita scene, and the emphasis on sisterhood outlived the reviews. That long tail is what convinced Warner Bros. to greenlight a second chapter nearly three decades later.

The new film is drawn from Alice Hoffman’s 2021 novel The Book of Magic, with a screenplay credited to Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel. The film’s plot picks up years after the original, with Sally (Bullock) having erased her daughters’ memories of magic to spare them the family curse. Joey King and Maisie Williams play the grown daughters, replacing Evan Rachel Wood and Alexandra Artrip from the first film, while Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing return as the aunts who raised the Owens sisters. Lee Pace joins as a professor of dark magic, and Xolo Maridueña appears as the boyfriend whose fate reactivates the curse.

The sequel arrives in a crowded lane of witchy revivals. Nostalgia for the era has been kind to films like Hocus Pocus 2, which turned a 1993 cult favorite into a modern streaming event decades later. Practical Magic 2 is betting the same appetite still exists, only this time in theaters.

Critics Weren’t Invited to the Party

The reviews are rough. Practical Magic 2 sits at 36% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 45 on Metacritic. Variety’s critic called it “as cumbersome and overlong as the 28-year wait” between the two films. The New York Post was blunter still, labeling the sequel cursed and arguing that the charm of the original is entirely absent.

Runtime is part of the complaint. At two hours and 10 minutes, the sequel runs roughly half an hour longer than its predecessor, and several critics argued the middle stretch stalls before the payoff arrives.

Not everyone piled on. Mashable argued the sequel is actually superior to the original, praising the reunion, and most reviews conceded that Bullock and Kidman remain magnetic together. That matters for a film whose entire pitch is watching two old friends share a screen again.

There is also precedent for the critics being wrong about this particular franchise. The 1998 movie was panned and became a favorite anyway. The people who loved the first one were never watching it for the plot.

A Studio That Badly Needs a Win

Warner Bros. has not released a single film that crossed $100 million domestically in 2026. According to TheWrap, that is the studio’s worst drought in a quarter century, the first time it has reached September without a nine-figure domestic hit since 2001.

The industry’s overall summer was historic, with a record $4.76 billion in North American grosses, but Warner Bros. finished sixth among the majors. The studio that opened 2025 with A Minecraft Movie and Sinners has spent this year watching rivals eat its lunch.

September is traditionally where Warner Bros. recovers. The studio owns the four biggest September domestic openings ever: 2017’s IT with $123.4 million, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with $111 million, It: Chapter Two with $91 million, and The Conjuring: Last Rites with $84 million. Practical Magic 2 will not touch those numbers, but a $30 million-plus opening would still be the studio’s best live-action debut in months.

Passing the Crown

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not limping out of the top spot so much as handing it over. The film is projected to land around $10 million to $11 million in its seventh weekend, which would push its domestic total to roughly $923 million and its worldwide haul to $2.4 billion.

Sometime this weekend, it should pass Star Wars: The Force Awakens and its $936.66 million domestic gross to become the highest-grossing movie in North American box office history, unadjusted for inflation. A decade-long record ends the same weekend a witch sequel takes the crown for a week.

Behind them, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey should hold third with about $9 million in its ninth weekend, nudging past $590 million domestic and closing in on $600 million. Coyote vs. Acme, the Looney Tunes film Warner Bros. shelved and then released to surprising success, is tracking fourth with roughly $6 million and a $39.9 million domestic cume.

The Director Behind the Spell

Susanne Bier directed the sequel, and her resume explains why the film looks the way it does. The Danish filmmaker won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film with In a Better World in 2011, directed the Emmy-winning limited series The Night Manager, and made Netflix’s post-apocalyptic thriller Bird Box with Bullock in 2018, eight years before reteaming with her here.

That combination of prestige drama and genre pulp is exactly what Practical Magic 2 is reaching for. Whether it lands is the open question, and the opening weekend will not answer it. Legs will.

Also Opening This Weekend

Practical Magic 2 is not the only new arrival. Disney’s Oasis documentary Don’t Look Back in Anger, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival to rave reviews and a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, is eyeing $5 million to $7 million from about 1,200 theaters. The film follows Liam and Noel Gallagher’s reunion tour and includes their first joint interview in two decades.

Neon’s Hope, the sci-fi thriller from Korean director Na Hong-jin, opened Wednesday to $1.1 million from 1,506 theaters after already banking more than $36 million in South Korea. Focus Features also launches The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s medieval revolt epic with Andrew Garfield, and Angel Studios counters with Runner, an action comedy pairing Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson.

Will the Spell Hold?

Opening weekend is the easy part for a nostalgia play. The hard part is the second weekend, when the audience that showed up for the reunion has already showed up. A 36% critics’ score will not sink a movie like this on its own, but weak word of mouth will.

What Practical Magic 2 has going for it is a specific, loyal, and largely female audience that has waited 28 years for this. That is a demographic Hollywood rediscovered this year and one Warner Bros. is counting on to keep its fall alive. If the Owens sisters hold up through September, the studio gets something it has not had all year: a genuine hit.

Did you catch Practical Magic 2 in theaters this weekend, or are you waiting for streaming? Let us know in the comments.

Sources: Deadline, Variety, TheWrap, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Gold Derby.