Practical Magic 2’s $4M+ Previews Spell a Strong Opening

Twenty-eight years after audiences first fell for the Owens sisters, Practical Magic 2 is finally in theaters — and it’s not sneaking into the weekend quietly. The long-gestating sequel from Warner Bros and Alcon Entertainment conjured a strong start in Thursday previews, with estimates landing north of $4 million before the opening weekend even began.

The Numbers: A Spell of a Thursday

Showtimes kicked off Thursday at 2 p.m., and the box office reports rolled in steadily through the night. Deadline’s early estimate put previews between $3.5 million and $4 million; by Friday morning, Variety’s updated tally had the figure at $4.7 million. Tracking services settled in around the $4 million mark for the night — a solid launching pad for a movie that trades in nostalgia rather than spectacle.

Where does that leave the weekend? Domestic tracking currently points to an opening around $40 million, according to World of Reel, with the trade press’s pre-weekend forecast pegging the global outlook at $58 million to $63 million. That would be a genuinely strong debut for a legacy sequel — especially one that isn’t a superhero movie, a remake of a beloved animated classic, or part of a billion-dollar franchise.

Boxoffice Pro is already framing it as the first real test of Spider-Man’s long box office reign: Practical Magic 2 is expected to put a hex on the holdover champ’s top spot this weekend.

Twenty-Eight Years in the Making

To understand why this sequel exists at all, you have to go back to 1998, when Practical Magic arrived in theaters. Based on Alice Hoffman’s novel, the film followed Sally and Gillian Owens — witchy sisters raised by their eccentric aunts in a seaside Massachusetts town, haunted by a family curse that dooms any man they fall in love with.

The 1998 movie opened to a modest $13 million in October and finished with $46 million domestically and roughly $95 million worldwide. Critics were lukewarm; the Tomatometer has never been kind. None of that mattered. The film found a second life on cable and home video, where it became one of those movies that plays in the background of a thousand cozy fall weekends. A generation grew up treating it as a comfort classic, and somewhere along the way, “the witchy sisters movie” became appointment viewing every October.

That cult status is the engine behind the sequel. Warner Bros and Alcon are betting — with a reported budget in the neighborhood of $75 million — that the audience who kept the original alive on streaming and cable will actually show up to a theater this time.

Practical Magic 2: Back to the Owens House

Practical Magic 2 picks up with the Owens sisters once more. Sandra Bullock returns as Sally, Nicole Kidman is back as the gloriously chaotic Gillian, and both former aunts — Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest — are along for the ride. The new generation gets plenty of screen time too: Joey King steps in as a grown-up Kylie Owens, Maisie Williams plays Antonia, and Lee Pace and Xolo Maridueña round out the ensemble. Per TMDB, the story finds the Owens family confronting the dark curse that threatens to unravel them once and for all.

The casting news carried a bit of drama before the movie even opened. Evan Rachel Wood, who played the young Kylie Owens in the 1998 original, said last week that she was recast against her wishes and that no one who worked on the original film reached out to her before the part went to Joey King. It’s a messy footnote to an otherwise feel-good reunion — and it gave the movie weeks of free press heading into release.

A Director Who Knows These Women

Behind the camera is Oscar-winning Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier, and she came in with a serious advantage: she has already directed both leads. Bier steered Sandra Bullock through the survival thriller Bird Box, one of Netflix’s biggest hits, and she teamed with Nicole Kidman on the HBO limited series The Undoing and the murder-mystery romp The Perfect Couple.

That kind of shorthand matters for a film built on chemistry. The original worked because Bullock’s grounded, reluctant Sally and Kidman’s free-spirited Gillian felt like real sisters, and Bier has spent the past decade working with these actors at the top of their games. Kidman, of course, has made a whole second career out of premium TV — from Big Little Lies through a string of HBO mysteries — so her stretch between prestige series and witchy nostalgia plays is exactly the kind of swing the sequel needs.

Critics Shrug, Audiences Swoon

If you’re sensing a pattern with this franchise, you’re right. Rotten Tomatoes currently has the sequel sitting in the mid-30s — barely above the original’s score from 1998. But that was never really the point. Practical Magic is a movie critics shrugged at and audiences adopted. It’s warm, it’s funny, it’s a little bit spooky, and it never takes itself too seriously. Early reactions suggest the sequel is leaning into exactly the same energy.

There’s also something bigger at play here: this is one of the high-profile test cases for the industry’s push into “women’s pictures” — movies made for and marketed to the female audience that studios spent years undervaluing. A strong opening would send a message that comfort-nostalgia, as much as IP and spectacle, can fill theaters in 2026.

The release window is doing the movie favors, too. Early September is traditionally one of the quietest stretches on the theatrical calendar — a dead zone between the summer blockbusters and the awards-season rush — which means Practical Magic 2 isn’t fighting a wall of expensive competition for screens. It’s also arriving just before the annual October streaming surge, when every platform dusts off its witchy and spooky catalogs for Halloween. The sequel gets to own the conversation while the season’s mood is still building, and that kind of positioning, paired with the built-in nostalgia audience, is exactly how mid-budget sequels turn into quiet hits.

The Witchy Watchlist

If the sequel leaves you hungry for more witchy entertainment, the streaming lanes are deep. The 1990s were surprisingly rich in this territory: The Craft brought teen witchcraft to the screen with attitude, Charmed turned sisterly magic into a seven-season TV staple, and the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina gave the genre a dark, modern makeover. Pair any of those with a rewatch of the original Practical Magic and you’ve got a perfect October movie night — no pumpkin spice required.

The real question is what happens next. If Practical Magic 2 lands its projected $40 million domestic opening and the global numbers follow Deadline’s forecast, the Owens family saga suddenly looks like a franchise worth keeping around. Hollywood loves a comeback story, and there’s something fitting about the witchiest sisters in cinema doing it in a season where the whole world is gearing up for Halloween.

Are you planning to catch the sequel this weekend, or is the 1998 original still the only Practical Magic you need? Either way, the opening-weekend numbers will tell us a lot about what audiences really want from their nostalgia.