Practical Magic 2 Drops Its Full Trailer and Locks September 11

Warner Bros. put out the full trailer for Practical Magic 2 on Wednesday, and it does the one thing a sequel trailer arriving 28 years after the original has to do: it shows you the new people without shoving the old ones offstage. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are back as Sally and Gillian Owens. The movie opens in theaters September 11.

That date is the headline as much as anything. Warner has parked the film in mid-September, the slot where it released the first one back in 1998, which is the studio quietly leaning on what everybody already knows: Practical Magic is autumn counter-programming. It opened soft in '98 and then spent two decades becoming an October ritual on cable and home video. You don't schedule the sequel against summer tentpoles. You schedule it for sweater weather.

What the trailer actually shows

The clip spends most of its runtime introducing the next generation of Owens women. Joey King and Maisie Williams play Sally's daughters, and the curse the first movie built its whole plot around (love an Owens woman, die badly) lands on them fast. King's character has a boyfriend, played by Xolo Maridueña, and the trailer dispatches him in the cruelest way the franchise knows: he's run down by a car while riding a bike with a fistful of rose bouquets. The Owens curse has never been subtle, and the sequel isn't pretending otherwise.

Kidman gets the loosest material. She pantses Bullock in one beat and drags her to see a man played by Lee Pace, who is under a spell and wearing nothing but a strategically placed sheet. Stockard Channing's Aunt Fran is back with Dianne Wiest's Aunt Jet, and Channing gets the line the marketing is building around:

No magic is stronger than sisterhood.

That is the whole pitch in six words. The first film survived on the chemistry between its two leads more than on its plot, which was a mess, and the sequel seems to know that the reunion is the reason anyone showed up.

Who made it

This is not the same crew behind the camera. Griffin Dunne directed the 1998 film. Practical Magic 2 is directed by Susanne Bier, who made Bird Box and The Night Manager and tends to take genre material more seriously than it expects to be taken. That's an interesting hire for a movie that could easily coast on nostalgia.

The script comes from Akiva Goldsman, who co-wrote the original, working with Georgia Pritchett from Succession, with Kelly Marcel also credited. It's based on Alice Hoffman's 2021 novel The Book of Magic, the same way the first film adapted her 1995 Practical Magic. Bullock and Kidman both produce, alongside returning producer Denise Di Novi.

The cast

Returning:

• Sandra Bullock as Sally Owens
• Nicole Kidman as Gillian Owens
• Dianne Wiest as Aunt Jet
• Stockard Channing as Aunt Frances

New:

• Joey King and Maisie Williams as Sally's daughters
• Lee Pace
• Xolo Maridueña
• Solly McLeod

What to actually watch for

The first Practical Magic is a strange object. The reviews were rough in 1998, the box office was tepid, and none of it mattered, because the movie found its audience later and kept it. A sequel inherits all that goodwill and all that risk at once. The thing people love about the original is the hangout energy: two sisters, a kitchen, a margarita scene that has nothing to do with the plot. The trailer leans into that. Whether Bier can deliver two hours of it without the curse machinery grinding the mood flat is the open question, and a trailer can't answer it.

For now, what's new is concrete. The date is set, the full trailer is out, and the next generation has faces. We'll know in September whether the magic survived the gap.