Practical Magic 2: the Owens sisters return, and so do the candles (trailer).

There are certain films that arrive not so much as movies, but as seasonal weather patterns. The original Practical Magic drifted into cinemas in 1998 like a cinnamon-scented fog rolling through a New England gift shop. Critics sniffed at it. Audiences quietly adopted it like a cursed black cat that keeps knocking wine glasses off the table but somehow becomes part of the family anyway.

Now, nearly three decades later, Practical Magic 2 is heading for cinemas, carrying a basket full of ancestral trauma, suspicious candles, and enough velvet shawls to bankrupt a coven-themed Etsy store.

And honestly? The trailer looks gloriously aware of exactly what sort of film it is.

The returning Owens sisters, played once again by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, appear to have spent the intervening years continuing their campaign to make witchcraft look vastly more stylish than ordinary adulthood. The creaky house is back. Midnight rituals are back. Suspiciously photogenic candlelight is back. Somewhere, an entire generation of goth-adjacent millennials just dropped £400 on decorative apothecary jars without consciously deciding to.

This time, the story is based on Alice Hoffman’s novel The Book of Magic, with the Owens family curse once again rattling chains in the attic. The trailer leans hard into the family legacy angle, mixing spooky inheritance drama with that peculiar cosy menace the franchise specialises in. It’s horror for people who want demonic omens but also tasteful kitchen lighting.

Director Susanne Bier seems to understand the assignment perfectly. The trailer has that dreamy “wine at midnight while discussing fate” atmosphere, but now with a larger fantasy canvas and a younger cast orbiting the veteran witches like apprentice sorcerers trying not to accidentally summon something regrettable during a gap year.

The cast also includes Joey King, Lee Pace, Maisie Williams, Xolo Maridueña, Solly McLeod, Stockard Channing, and Dianne Wiest, which is a pretty decent roll call for a film about family secrets, moonlit consequences, and why nobody in fiction ever learns not to tamper with ancient curses.

Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest returning as the gloriously eccentric aunts is especially welcome. They look less like people who have aged and more like they have been preserved in moonwater, sarcasm, and very good lighting. Frankly, if they opened a side business advising people on both hex removal and interior design, we’d watch six seasons and a Christmas special.

Naturally, the internet is likely to react as though Warner Bros. has personally resurrected the Autumn Equinox. Expect pumpkin-spice think-pieces. Expect TikTok witch aesthetics. Expect bookstores suddenly placing crystals next to the fantasy section again. Somewhere, Fleetwood Mac can probably sense a disturbance in the Force.

What’s most interesting is how Practical Magic has mutated culturally over the years. Back in the late 1990s, it was treated as a slightly odd romantic fantasy curiosity. Now it occupies the sacred cinematic territory of “beloved comfort movie watched repeatedly during thunderstorms”. That gives the sequel a strange kind of power. It doesn’t just have to be good. It has to feel like finding an old spellbook in the attic wrapped in a blanket that smells faintly of cloves.

At least from the trailer, it seems to understand that.

Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we suspect this could either become a glorious supernatural reunion feast or an overcooked cauldron of nostalgia stew. But judging by the trailer’s mix of witchy melodrama, family curses, candlelit chaos, and gothic nonsense, we’re absolutely willing to pull up a chair at the séance and find out.

Practical Magic 2 will be released in UK and Irish cinemas on 11th September 2026 by Warner Bros. Pictures.