By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Twenty-eight years on from Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman stirring up trouble as the witchy Owens sisters, the 1998 fantasy romcom Practical Magic is getting a sequel — and its new stars think they know why now is the moment for it.
According to the BBC, Maisie Williams and Joey King, who feature in the upcoming follow-up, say audiences are longing for simpler times, and that appetite is part of what's driving the return to Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman's world of herb gardens, family curses and small-town magic.
It's a modest claim, and the two actresses are the only named source for it in the reporting available here — no polling, no studio data, just two performers reading the room from inside a press cycle. That's worth flagging plainly: this is an assertion from people with a film to sell, not a documented cultural trend. Still, it rings true enough. Comfort viewing has been Hollywood's steadiest export since the pandemic taught everyone to treasure a familiar couch and a familiar plot. Sequels, reboots and legacy sequels — Top Gun: Maverick, Frozen, the endless Jurassic churn — have outperformed nearly everything original at the box office for years, and nostalgia is the engine, not the accident.
What made the original Practical Magic work wasn't its plot, which was baggy even in 1998, but its mood: witchcraft as inheritance, sisterhood as spellbook, grief handled with a wink instead of a lecture. If Williams and King's film can bottle that tone rather than just repackage the title, it might earn its nostalgia rather than merely trade on it. No release date or plot details were included in the available reporting, so judgment on the film itself will have to wait.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."