LOS ANGELES — The critics had their say in late spring. Audiences gave their verdict this weekend, and it arrived at the box office in the form of a $30 million opening.
Practical Magic 2 debuted at No. 1 domestically on Sunday, landing Warner Bros.’ long-awaited sequel to the 1998 cult touchstone at the top of the North American chart after six consecutive weekends owned by Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The film grossed an estimated $30 million from 4,146 theaters, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It added roughly $16 million from 77 international markets, bringing the worldwide opening to approximately $46 million, a debut that landed at the low end of Warner Bros.’ projected $30 to $35 million domestic range.
The number that studios will actually study is not $30 million. It is the 58-point gap between the film’s Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 34 percent and its audience rating of 92 percent. Few wide-release studio films have opened in 2026 with that kind of internal schism, and for anyone old enough to remember the original’s trajectory, the gap has a familiar shape. Practical Magic debuted in October 1998 to a Rotten Tomatoes score of 30 percent and underwhelming theatrical returns before spending the following two decades becoming appointment October viewing for a generation that found something in the Owens sisters that critics had apparently missed. Whether the sequel is tracing the same arc is unknowable after one weekend. But the audience score suggests the film found its intended viewers on opening day.
Director Susanne Bier, whose previous collaboration with Nicole Kidman on The Perfect Couple established the working relationship that Warner Bros. leveraged here, delivered a film built from Alice Hoffman’s fourth Owens-family novel, The Book of Magic. The screenplay is by Akiva Goldsman, who worked on the original and whose signature is visible in the mythology’s expansion. The story carries the Owens sisters nearly three decades forward. Sandra Bullock’s Sally Owens is now raising two adult children in the house on Magnolia Street, her life considerably wider than when the curse first presented itself. Kidman’s Gillian Owens, child-free and living with her black cat, arrives when the next generation’s proximity to the curse forces a confrontation both sisters had been avoiding.
Joey King plays the role that triggers the sequel’s central conflict: Gilly’s daughter, whose boyfriend is drawn into the orbit of the family’s still-operational romantic curse, forcing the sisters to ask whether it can be broken or only deferred to the next person unlucky enough to fall in love. The ensemble also includes Lee Pace, Maisie Williams, Xolo Maridueña, Dianne Wiest, and Stockard Channing, with Wiest and Channing reprising their roles as the Aunts.
CinemaScore handed Practical Magic 2 a B+. WB’s distribution team will read that as a viable foundation for second-weekend retention, with the original Practical Magic’s longer arc as their preferred precedent. That film earned its reputation not through its opening weekend but through years of replay and referral. The sequel arrives into a streaming landscape where theatrical windows are shorter, but the 92 percent audience approval suggests the fandom arrived ready.
The wider context for a No. 1 finish this particular weekend is the ongoing question of what dethroning Spider-Man actually means against a $2.4 billion global blockbuster. Spider-Man: Brand New Day dominated the North American chart for six consecutive weekends on the way to its historic run. What Practical Magic 2 offers instead is evidence that female-led studio fare can clear the theatrical threshold in a market where the summer was built almost entirely around franchise IP with predominantly male leads.
Fall 2026’s entertainment calendar is competing for attention from multiple directions simultaneously. On the streaming side, Slow Horses Season 6 premieres this week with the return of a character the show had declared dead, and Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story drops September 17 with Ella Beatty in the lead role of the franchise’s fourth installment. The Emmy Awards race is already taking shape against this dense fall schedule, with Kidman’s name in the conversation that typically follows a performer’s most prominent calendar-year work.
For Warner Bros., the second-weekend number will clarify the franchise question. Akiva Goldsman has indicated publicly that he sees the Owens universe as an ongoing property, with material remaining in Hoffman’s subsequent novels. That conversation becomes real only if the audience that arrived opening weekend stays, refers, and returns. It is the same slow accumulation that made the original irreplaceable to a generation that first found it on VHS.
The witches are back. Whether the argument about what that is worth goes in their favor will be answered next Sunday.
