Practical Magic 2 Review: The Stars Still Cast a Spell, the Script Does Not

Practical Magic 2 is worth watching for two actresses in their sixties whom the camera is extremely kind to, and for a sequel that finally treats the family curse as something real. Everything between those two points is a 130-minute legacy-sequel machine that runs out of road. The audience loved it anyway. Critics did not. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 36 percent from 170 reviews and Metacritic sits at 44 from 41 critic reviews, both checked on October 21, 2026, and the same platform's Popcornmeter is at 90 percent from more than 2,500 verified ratings.

The film opened in US and Australian cinemas on September 10, 2026 and in the UK on September 11, runs 130 minutes and carries a PG-13 for brief strong language, suggestive material and some violent content. The Numbers, checked on October 21, 2026, has it at $68,281,338 domestic and $105,081,338 worldwide. Warner Bros. Pictures distributed it, and the picture is based on Alice Hoffman's 2021 novel The Book of Magic.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it if you loved the first one and you want the company of Bullock and Kidman, with a bottle of tequila within reach. Skip it if you need a plot that stays on the rails. A 130-minute, PG-13 fantasy comedy with 36 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 170 critic reviews as of October 21, 2026, and 44 on Metacritic. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Practical Magic 2 is about

The 1998 film was about Sally and Gillian Owens, two Massachusetts sisters raised by their aunts Jet (Dianne Wiest) and Franny (Stockard Channing), and about the family rule that every man an Owens woman loves dies. This sequel picks up the same two sisters, the same curse and the same aunts, twenty-eight years on, and adds two daughters, a second generation and a grimoire that nobody in Massachusetts can open.

Sally is widowed for the second time. Gary, the cop who helped clear her and Gillian of the killing of Gillian's abusive serial-killer ex in the first film and who Aidan Quinn played, was her second husband, and the curse has taken him as well. Sally's response is the only one the film allows: she has sworn off magic, sworn off love, and cast a spell that wipes every memory of witchcraft out of her daughters' minds so that they can never know what they are. Twenty-eight years later, Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams) are two young women in Massachusetts who have no idea their mother can light a room with a look.

Kylie has a boyfriend, Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), and she says she loves him, and the next morning he is in a hospital bed in a coma. Kylie finds the Book of Ravens, a grimoire her aunt Jet found and could not open, and takes it to England, which is where the Owens line started and where the locked pages of the book point. Sally and Gillian follow her, and the family ends up in a small English town called Thornfield, at a manor with a very specific history.

Cast and performances

Bullock and Kidman are the reason to be in the room, and both are better than the script deserves. Peter Sobczynski at RogerEbert.com pointed out the obvious problem and then the bigger one: "Bullock and Kidman are literally playing the same character beats as the first time around, making it seem as if nothing about their relationship has changed since we last saw them." The Guardian's Adrian Horton was kinder, calling them "beguiling eccentricity and earthy exasperation, both singularly endearing in their primes," and noting that they play the parts "with muscle memory that is fascinating in its own right." They are 60 years old and the film is shot with the reverence of a tribute band.

Wiest and Channing are lovely and wasted. The Guardian's Horton called the two of them "by far the film's most luminous screen presence," and then pointed out that they are left "stranded at the hospital in Boston" for most of the running time. Sobczynski agreed that "while it is nice to have them back, their appearances are perfunctory at best."

Joey King gets the most to do and is good at it, playing a young witch with no training and a bad plan. Maisie Williams is the character the film forgets, spending nearly the whole runtime fretting over a hospital room; Sobczynski called her "the biggest victim." Lee Pace is the surprise. He plays Ian Wright, an academic who specialises in the dark arts and who, in Sobczynski's phrase, "delivers the most compelling performance, striking genuine sparks with Bullock in their scenes together." For a movie so overtly female-centric, that is a strange place to find the best work, and Sobczynski said so.

What works

The two stars. There is a reason this movie exists beyond the rights, and it is the twenty-eight years of practice the two of them have had arguing with each other. Every scene of the two of them bickering in a big New England house is worth the ticket.

The Book of Ravens and Thornfield. The English stretch is the best-built part of the film, the one place where the fantasy machinery is doing work rather than gesturing at itself. The village has a history, the manor has a history, and the magic has rules that somebody thought about.

The last act, which is where the sequel finally earns its runtime. More on that below.

What doesn't

It is overstuffed, and it knows it. Sobczynski: "the screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel is slightly less convoluted than before, it is still overstuffed with too many plot developments and characters, so many, in fact, that even at 130 minutes (roughly a half-hour longer than its predecessor), a number of them are barely introduced before being cast aside." Deadline's Glenn Garner had a different complaint about the same thing, writing that the film "reads a bit more Harry Potter than Witches of Eastwick" in this "long overdue reunion."

The theme gets said out loud. The Guardian's Horton found the film's "overarching, if occasionally overwritten ('no magic is stronger than sisterhood'), theme of feminine solidarity through cyclical adversity" to be winning anyway, which is generous. The Hollywood Reporter's Angie Han was blunter, calling the film a spellbook "with all its pages glued shut, for all the enchantment you're likely to extract from it."

The timeline does not hold still. The first film takes place in March 1998, which the Guardian's Horton noted "so says Quinn's investigator Gary Hallet when interviewing Sally for the suspected murder of Gilly's serial killer ex." The sequel's new headstones put those events in the early 2000s. Horton called it "a little magical fudging of the timeline" and admitted it will irritate anyone who is timeline-sensitive.

The recasting. Kylie and Antonia were played by Evan Rachel Wood and Alexandra Artrip in 1998 and are now Joey King and Maisie Williams. By the sequel's own arithmetic the daughters should be in their mid-thirties, and the new casting keeps them in their early twenties. The Guardian's Horton, who is funny about it, notes that the sisters themselves are "older now than Channing and Wiest were in the original but with fewer laugh lines."

What audiences say

The audience is on the other side of the critics here. Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 36 percent from 170 reviews and the Popcornmeter at 90 percent from more than 2,500 verified ratings, a fifty-four point gap. The platform's critics consensus says the film is "Nostalgic and inert, Practical Magic 2 has charms thanks to Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman's sisterly rapport, but its mechanical plotting is a whole lot of toil that's not worth the trouble."

Metacritic's metascore is 44 from 41 critic reviews, labelled "Mixed or Average," with a user score of 4.4 from 46 ratings. Letterboxd's member average is 2.84 from 165,456 ratings and 82,285 written reviews. TMDB has the film at 7.0 from 260 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026. The 2.84 on Letterboxd and the 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes are both true, and the distance between them is the entire subject of the movie.

Where to watch Practical Magic 2

The film came off the screen and went to the digital shelf on October 13, 2026. JustWatch searched 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and lists it to rent on Plex, Amazon Video, Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, and to buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, with no free option anywhere and no subscription service. The New York Post's Page Six reported on October 13, 2026 that Prime Video has it for $19.99 to rent or $24.99 to buy, and TMDB's US provider list agrees. The film is also still playing in US cinemas.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Practical Magic 2 streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Practical Magic 2 worth watching? Yes, as a comfortable evening with two actresses you have loved for thirty years, and as a sequel that finally takes its own family curse seriously. The 36 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and the 2.84 on Letterboxd are not unkind, because the plot really does buckle under its own apparatus and the new generation of witches gets the short end of a film about the old one. The 90 percent audience score is the people who came for the midnight margarita. Both of those things are true at once, which is also the curse.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Practical Magic 2

Early on, a deathwatch beetle starts sounding, which in this family means a witch is near her end, and it is Jet. She has found the Book of Ravens and she cannot open the sealed pages that hold the cure. She dies at the end of a birthday party, and Sally says the line that reorganises the whole family: "We're the aunts now."

The mechanism of the curse is old, and The Cinemaholic's ending explainer lays out the tree. Maria Owens cast a curse over her bloodline so that every man loved by an Owens woman would meet a bitter end. Her mother Hannah Owens was taken by Lord Lockland, bore his child and was burned at the stake at the Lockland manor, and that illegitimate line, the Locklands, carries the name and none of the Owens magic. Tom Lockland (Solly McLeod), the farmer Kylie meets in Thornfield, has come for her power because he has none of his own. The ritual he talks her into is a spell to break the curse, and the real spell is a transfer, taking her magic and giving it to him. Sally and Gillian find her in time, and the three Owens women take Tom on together and win. ScreenRant's explainer puts his death at the spot where the ancestor burned.

Then the book, fed on the magic that was used, finally opens the sealed pages. The cure is there, and the price is a life. The curse was sealed with a life, so it can only be unsealed with one, and one of the Owens women has to choose to die. Franny has already heard the deathwatch beetle herself, and she decides that if she is going, she is going for something. She performs the ritual and the curse breaks. Gideon wakes up in the hospital.

A year later, Kylie and Gideon marry in the backyard of Sally's house, the first Owens wedding on screen that is not doomed, and the whole town comes. Sally has stopped running. She left England without kissing Ian Wright because of the curse, and once the curse is broken she stops holding back, and by the wedding the two of them are together and Ian has flown out to Boston for it. Antonia is studying to become a neurosurgeon, and Gillian is the only aunt Kylie has left.