The second trailer for Practical Magic 2 dropped yesterday, and I do not need to see the full movie to know it’s shyte. The film that millions of millennial women have watched, loved, and pinned to Pinterest boards under “coastal Victorian witch house I’ll never afford” has been Disnified.
What made 1998’s Practical Magic so good was the absence of bad Tinder jokes and big-budget special effects: no floating objects, glowing body parts, or Marvel-style fight scenes that force the viewer into alternate realities.
The old world of Sally and Gillian was animated by nature (roses that grew in the garden overnight), the invisible bond between women and sisters (belladonna, anyone?), and the innate inner knowing every woman possesses. “There’s a little witch in all of us,” Aunt Jet coos to the ragtag coven assembled in her kitchen toward the film’s end.
“Throw spilled salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck…”
These were the spellbinding words Sally says right before the credits roll. Though ordinary at first blush, what made them feel charged with power was their existence in our world: their tangibility, their accessibility, and the way they made the possibility of magic in women’s own lives feel real.
In PM 2, the teaser shows books ablaze with Harry Potter–like special effects and the scars from our beloved sisters’ blood oath illuminated when activated — an insult to the viewer’s imagination, which needed no visual enhancement to understand the life force pulsing between Sally and Gillian.
It was the invisible moments of energy exchanged – between lovers, between sisters, between women in a circle with their Dustbusters and kitchen brooms – that made this movie magic.
We saw ourselves in these women through the things we cannot see but intuitively know.
Yes, Sally may breathe candles to life and Gillian’s body may be a vessel for dead former lovers in round one, but it was just the right amount of movie magic that felt more parlor trick than CGI spectacle, more wink than cinematic flex.
I won’t even get into the disappointment of the casting.
Well, maybe I will a little.
The decision not to cast the original daughters feels like a betrayal of the very sisterhood the story is propped up on — a sentiment subtly echoed by actor Evan Rachel Wood, who commented, “...I would have happily rejoined my sisters,” in response to the outcry from fans.
So what if they’ve grown up in the last 30 years? Are we supposed to believe Nicky and Sandy stayed as frozen as their faces? (No shade. I can’t wait for my first facelift!)
With Sandra Bullock’s hard launch on Instagram seemingly for the sole purpose of promoting this movie (her debut post teased midnight margaritas), it’s hard not to suspect Joey King was a metrics hire, with 17 million followers to Wood’s fewer than 900,000 on her private account.
In under four minutes between the two trailers combined, the world that felt familiar and possible collapsed into something foreign and pandering. Sure, there are midnight margaritas and sweeping shots of the Owens sisters’ house, but the real magic of Practical Magic was the faith in women to believe in the things we cannot see.
Yeah, it is disappointing but unsurprising since I can't imagine any modern film executive understanding a single thing about why that movie speaks to generations of women.