The Owens sisters are back at last

With all these legacy sequels coming out over the next year, I am on tenterhooks, living in Schrödinger’s box of managing expectations. As long as the movies are not yet out, they might still be good, which is very much where I am living with Practical Magic 2. Practical Magic is one of my favorite movies of all time; it’s a romance movie, a sisterhood movie, a magic movie—a movie with one of the greatest cinematic houses of all time. Now, the teaser for the sequel is here and, oh. Hope is the thing with the most delicate feathers!

In case you do not remember, Practical Magic was adapted from Alice Hoffman’s novel of the same name, and stars Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as a pair of witchy sisters who live under a terrible curse: every person they fall in love with will die. When we meet Sally Owens (Bullock), she is a recently widowed mother of two young girls, and her free-spirit sister, Gillian (Kidman), returns to town with trouble on her heels. It’s a great film, if you haven’t seen it, you should.

But Practical Magic is only one of a series of novels about the Owens family, and Practical Magic 2 is based on another book in the series, The Book of Magic. This is where my hope for the sequel lives, that because there is a blueprint for expanding the world of the Owens sisters, the filmmakers won’t be groping in the dark for a reason—beyond money—for this film to exist. There is a story to be told, Alice Hoffman has already told it.

Am I nervous that screenwriter Akiva Goldsman is a credited writer on the sequel? Yes, of course. I know the man has an Oscar for screenwriting (for adapting A Beautiful Mind), but he also wrote the screenplays for some of the worst adaptations of the contemporary era, including Winter’s Tale (total nonsense), The Da Vinci Code and its sequel, Angels & Demons (foolishness), The 5^th Wave (condescending YA drivel), and one of the Divergent movies (utter dreck). I can only hope that the contributions of credited co-writer Georgia Pritchett, a veteran of Armando Ianucci’s workshop, writing on The Thick of It and Veep, as well as Succession, can offset Goldsman’s appalling taste.

Also, Practical Magic 2 is directed by Susanne Bier, of The Night Manager and The Perfect Couple fame. At the very least, Practical Magic 2 should LOOK great, and I do think we’re seeing that in the trailer. The first film’s style is very much rooted in place, especially the Owens’ family’s enviable oceanside abode, that stunning, slightly haunting, Second Empire Victorian perched above the sea and swamped with flowers. The house is not real, they had to rebuild it for the sequel, and it is stunning, the most Nancy Meyers-coded movie house Nancy Meyers never designed.

Besides bringing back Bullock and Kidman, the sequel also has Stockard Channing and Dianne Weist returning as Sally and Gillian’s eccentric aunts, Frances and Jet. The sequel also introduces Lee Pace as a mysterious new man entering the Owens sisters’ lives—if you’ve read the book, don’t ruin the surprise for everyone else! I ADORE Lee Pace, anyone who casts him gets an automatic 10+ on the score sheet (Pushing Daisies for life!). We also see Maisie Williams and Joey King as Sally’s now-grown daughters—kind of sad they didn’t bring Evan Rachel Wood back, though—and it appears one of Sally’s daughters has fallen in love herself, and that the Owens women might be trying, finally, to break the family curse for the next generation. Apparently, Sally and Gillian did NOT break it back in the 90s.

Interestingly, the trailer goes heavy on magic, which isn’t really the focus of the first film. There IS magic, of course, but so much of the first film is about Sally wrangling with her legacy and attempting to live without magic, and Gillian isn’t gifted in the same way as her sister, so it’s not until the third act that things start getting really witchy. (The way I GASPED in the theater when Sally lit the candle with her breath! Yes, I ABSOLUTELY tried every fire-starting spell I could get my hands on!)

But this teaser makes it clear the Owens women are very much living in their magic, which means at the very least we’re getting a fun fantasy film out of Practical Magic 2. My absolute favorite alternate universe is “our world, but with magic”, which is exactly what Practical Magic is. I love the look of the teaser, I love the idea of catching up with Sally and Gillian decades after they tried, and apparently failed, to free their family from their curse. I want to meet Sally’s grown-up kids!

And yes, I want to see the magic. All of the magic, because this is the film that made me fall in love with the idea of everyday magic, that magic IS around us, if we just open our eyes. Legacy sequels are hard to pull off, it will be its own kind of magic if Practical Magic 2 delivers, but hopefully, with Alice Hoffman’s books guiding the way, we’re in for a magical revival and not another late-stage cash grab.  

Practical Magic Squawks, we're Squawking this teaser. Are you into it? Let us know all your thoughts and feelings! (App link here.)