These days Practical Magic is a spooky season classic, but did you know that when the original movie came out, it flopped? It disappointed at the box office and was slammed by critics. It’s, of course, since been embraced by audiences, and a sequel was just part of the 2026 movie schedule. Now, Sandra Bullock has taken some time to celebrate the movie’s ongoing importance and take shots at its critical reception.
The first Practical Magic movie hit theaters this weekend back in 1998. Here’s how Bullock remembered the witchy comedy on its anniversary:
28 years ago today, the first Practical Magic premiered. It was quite polarizing, with critics saying it had too many women, a tone that couldn’t quite find its footing, and was somehow too scary for children and too childish for adults. But what it was, at its heart, was a story about how we choose to love courageously, even in the face of heartbreak.
Practical Magic holds a quite low critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Washington Post’s Eve Zibart, for example, characterized it as “just a TV-ready mix of camp and curdle” at the time. Iconic critic Roger Ebert was the one who called it “too scary for children and too childish for adults,” and NY Times’s Janet Maslin described it as “nothing but a guilty pleasure”. The “too many women” comment is especially wild when you think about it.
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The movie also made $94 million against a reported production budget of around $75 million. As Sandra Bullock pointed out in her new post on Instagram, despite its commercial reception, Practical Magic has remained a very special movie to its fans. As she added:
Somewhere along the way, it found its audience and became something far greater than any of us could have imagined. Now, 28 years later, there’s another chapter to the story with Practical Magic 2. This new chapter is still full of women, maybe a little too scary for children, and just the right amount of childish for adults.
It took a long time for Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman to reunite for the sequel, but thanks to the movie becoming beloved over time, they made Practical Magic 2. The sequel also earned a similar score on RT (36%), but audiences who saw it were very happy to come back to it and gave it a lot of praise. Bullock also said this as she celebrated the anniversary:
As Alice Hoffman wrote, ‘My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage.’
What an apt quote for Practical Magic from the source material itself! The new movie allowed Bullock and Kidman to continue the story with Sally and Gilly Owens as middle-aged women – something we don’t see too often in big studio films. Practical Magic 2 opened at No. 1 at the box office and made $104.6 million worldwide. It wasn’t a stunning success either, but fans definitely showed up for this one. I expect once those with an HBO Max subscription can check it out, it’ll only soar higher.
Bullock’s message about the Practical Magic movies led Julianne Hough to write “All time favorite forever and always,” Olivia Munn posted a comment that said “It was, is and will always be a love letter to sisters and friends,” and so many others left messages about how much this movie means to them. Many cited watching the films with their own sisters and making powerful memories with them and Practical Magic.
They may not be critically acclaimed blockbusters, but they’re treasured by so many people, and doesn’t that mean more?
