Practical Magic 2 Opens to $30M at Domestic Box Office — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Practical Magic 2 opened to $30M domestically at 4,146 theaters, at the lower end of forecasts but within the mean of Sandra Bullock's recent starts: The Lost City ($30.4M), The Proposal ($33.6M) and The Blind Side ($34.1M)
- The $75M-net sequel, financed 50/50 by Warner Bros and Alcon, earned a 92% Rotten Tomatoes audience score and a B+ CinemaScore — an upgrade from the 1998 original's B- — with a 72% definite recommend
- Audiences skewed heavily female and older: 78% overall turnout, 69% women over 25, 36% over 45, with the under-25 female share climbing 10 points between Thursday and Saturday to 23%
- The total weekend landed at $83.4M, down 44% from the same frame a year ago ($124.5M) when The Conjuring: Last Rights opened to a franchise-high $84M
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day sat less than $10M from surpassing Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936.6M) as the highest-grossing domestic film ever, tracking $8.4M in its seventh weekend for a $935.1M running cume
- NEON's Hope, a Korean sci-fi alien-invasion film starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, debuted to $3.3M at 1,560 theaters after grossing over $36M in its home country of South Korea
- Practical Magic 2 generated 573.6M social media reach pre-opening across X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook — higher than Freakier Friday (460.2M), Snow White (534.2M) and Cruella (424.7M)
Why it matters: For Warner Bros and Alcon, the $30M debut clears the bar for a nostalgia sequel built on a female-skewing property with unusually strong word-of-mouth (92% audience vs. 36% critics) heading into a fall corridor light on wide releases — but the 44% year-over-year weekend collapse shows the post-Labor Day marketplace has thinned out, leaving holdovers like Spider-Man to chase the all-time domestic crown rather than generate fresh demand.
Ask SkimNews
