Nearly three decades before Practical Magic became an autumn ritual, a social media favourite and the kind of cult film capable of producing a major Hollywood sequel, Sandra Bullock remembers watching its first theatrical run unfold very differently.
The actor has reflected on the disappointment surrounding the 1998 release as she reunites with Nicole Kidman for Practical Magic 2, admitting that those involved believed audiences would embrace the original film, only for its arrival to be met with a far more muted response.
“It got quiet,” Bullock recalled while discussing the first movie. She said the filmmakers had expected audiences to connect with the unusual mixture of romance, comedy, supernatural drama and sisterhood at the centre of the story. Instead, questions quickly emerged about its predominantly female cast and its difficult-to-categorise tone.
Twenty-eight years later, that uncertainty has been replaced by something Hollywood understands very well: an audience that never really went away.
‘Practical Magic’ was not the hit Bullock expected
Released in October 1998, Practical Magic starred Bullock and Kidman as Sally and Gillian Owens, sisters descended from a family of witches and burdened by a curse that threatens the men they love.
Directed by Griffin Dunne and adapted from Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel, the film combined romantic comedy, fantasy, domestic drama and darker supernatural elements in a way that proved difficult to market and initially difficult for critics to embrace.
The original opened to about $13.1 million in North America and ultimately earned roughly $46.7 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo, against a reported production budget of around $75 million.
Critical reaction was similarly cool. Rotten Tomatoes currently records a 30% critics’ score, while its audience rating sits far higher at 73%, a divide that neatly illustrates how the movie’s reputation changed after its theatrical release.
Bullock’s memory of the period is therefore less a story about a forgotten film than about a movie that found its audience on an entirely different timetable.
She also used the recent conversation to defend Dunne’s contribution to the original, stressing that the director helped create the world that audiences would eventually come to cherish. Kidman, speaking alongside her, similarly credited Dunne with giving the actors room to define the Owens sisters.
How ‘Practical Magic’ became a cult classic
What happened after the box-office disappointment is arguably more interesting than the film’s original release.
Through home video, television, streaming and eventually social media, Practical Magic slowly transformed from an underperforming studio movie into a seasonal favourite.
Warner Bros. executive Pamela Abdy said earlier this year that the movie regularly rises among the studio’s most-watched titles around Halloween on HBO Max. She also pointed to the fan culture that has developed around the film, including themed parties, costumes and celebrations inspired by the Owens sisters and the movie’s now-famous “midnight margaritas” sequence.
That afterlife helps explain why Practical Magic 2 exists at all.
Hollywood has become increasingly willing to return to movies whose true cultural value was not necessarily reflected in their original ticket sales. Streaming data, social media engagement and generational fandom can now reveal demand that box-office receipts from decades ago could not measure.
For Practical Magic, the audience appears to have grown with the film.
Bullock herself described the original earlier this year as a story that viewers had “politely refused to let go,” an unusually apt description of a movie that spent years being rediscovered rather than simply revived.
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return for ‘Practical Magic 2’
That long-running affection has now brought Bullock and Kidman back together as Sally and Gillian Owens.
Practical Magic 2 reunites the pair nearly 30 years after the first film and brings back Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as Frances and Jet Owens. The new cast also includes Joey King, Maisie Williams, Lee Pace, Xolo Maridueña and Solly McLeod.
Susanne Bier, whose credits include Bird Box and The Night Manager, directs the sequel. Bullock and Kidman are also producers.
The new film draws on Hoffman’s The Book of Magic and moves the Owens story into another generation, with Sally’s daughters becoming central to the family’s latest confrontation with its supernatural inheritance. Warner Bros. says the film will begin its international theatrical rollout on September 9.
Rather than simply recreating the original, the sequel appears designed around the passage of time.
The new story focuses heavily on sisterhood, inheritance and the relationships between generations of Owens women, themes that were already present in the first movie but have acquired additional weight as Bullock and Kidman’s characters have aged.
The sequel arrives in a very different Hollywood
The timing of Practical Magic 2 also says something about the movie industry in 2026.
Studios are increasingly looking back to films from the 1990s and 2000s for franchises with established recognition. But Practical Magic differs from the most obvious nostalgia properties because it was not initially a blockbuster.
Its value was built gradually.
That makes the sequel a test of whether cult affection can be converted into contemporary theatrical demand.
Warner Bros. no longer has to judge the property’s popularity solely through the disappointing numbers from 1998. The studio can see decades of repeat viewing, streaming performance and online engagement.
Abdy has described that wider measurement of a film’s life as important to modern green-light decisions, arguing that theatrical box office is only one way of assessing whether a story continues to matter to audiences.
That philosophy helps turn the original film’s failure into the sequel’s strongest marketing story.
A movie audiences supposedly did not want in 1998 has spent almost three decades proving otherwise.
Why the Owens sisters endured
The continuing popularity of Practical Magic is not difficult to understand in retrospect.
Underneath the witches, curses and supernatural mythology, the story is built around a relationship Hollywood has historically explored less often than romantic love: the bond between adult sisters.
Sally and Gillian are very different women, but the film repeatedly returns to the idea that their relationship survives romantic disappointment, grief, danger and distance.
That theme has become increasingly central to the way Bullock and Kidman discuss the franchise.
Kidman has credited fans directly for pushing the sequel into existence, saying viewers continued asking for another chapter.
The sequel also gives Warner Bros. the opportunity to introduce the story to viewers who were not alive when the first film opened.
King and Williams help represent that next generation, while the return of Bullock, Kidman, Channing and Wiest provides the continuity longtime fans have demanded.
It is both sequel and handover.
From box-office disappointment to Hollywood franchise
There is a certain symmetry in Bullock revisiting the original film’s disappointing reception just as its sequel prepares to reach cinemas.
In 1998, Practical Magic seemed like evidence that an unusual genre mixture had failed to find an audience.
In 2026, Practical Magic 2 exists because the audience eventually found it anyway.
The original’s journey also complicates one of Hollywood’s oldest measures of success. A disappointing opening weekend can define a film’s reputation in the moment, but it does not necessarily define what that movie becomes.
Some films vanish after leaving theatres.
Others take years to reveal what they mean to people.
For Bullock, the silence that followed the original Practical Magic release was memorable enough to remain vivid almost three decades later.
What came after that silence, including home-video discovery, Halloween rewatches, streaming success, social media fandom and eventually a major theatrical sequel, may ultimately be the more important part of the story.
And as Sally and Gillian Owens return to cinemas, Hollywood is about to find out just how large that once-invisible audience has become.
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