Movies
‘Practical Magic 2’ – Warner Bros. Announces Sequel to the 1998 Movie
Magic feels practical in a place like this. To the surprise of probably everyone reading this, Warner Bros. has taken to TikTok, yes TikTok, to announce Practical Magic 2 this week.
Akiva Goldsman is on board to write the sequel’s screenplay.
The original 1998 movie was directed by An American Werewolf in London star Griffin Dunne, with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman leading the cast as bewitching sisters.
Variety reports that Bullock and Kidman are in talks to return!
In the 1998 film, based on Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel, “Two witch sisters (Bullock and Kidman), raised by their eccentric aunts in a small town, face closed-minded prejudice and a curse which threatens to prevent them ever finding lasting love.”
Practical Magic was released in theaters for Halloween 1998, scaring up $68.3 million against a reported $75 million production budget. And that’s not even factoring in the marketing spend from Warner Bros., which no doubt ensured that the film lost money in theaters.
But like many movies from the 1990s, Practical Magic has gone on to become something of a cult favorite, with a couple different television adaptations failing to materialize over the years.
We can’t say we ever expected Practical Magic 2 to be conjured up by the studio, but stranger things have happened. Will it be a direct sequel to the original? Or more of a remake/reboot? The TikTok posts from WB really don’t tell us anything about what’s in store, but we expect we’ll be learning more soon. So stay tuned for more on the Practical Magic sequel.
You can watch the original trailer for Practical Magic below.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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