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Di Novi talks to PEOPLE about realizing the film had finally found its audience in more recent years
NEED TO KNOW
- Practical Magic producer Denise Di Novi shares memories from working on the first film with PEOPLE
- Di Novi will also serve as producer on Practical Magic 2, in theaters on Sept. 11, 2026
- The producer tells PEOPLE how the upcoming film wouldn’t have been possible without fans’ love for the original
Denise Di Novi is grateful that Practical Magic found its coven.
When the film first came out in 1998, the odds weren’t entirely on its side. Still, Di Novi had a lot of faith in the story from its roots as a novel by Alice Hoffman.
“I had been for many years an Alice Hoffman fan. She writes a book a year, pretty much that are always New York Times bestsellers and always have magical realism at their core, and I’d always been a huge fan,” Di Novi tells PEOPLE. “When I read the early galley of this one, it just really, really resonated with me, mainly because of this sisterhood story.”
“I have a sister and I had made the first Little Women about sisterhood. It’s a theme that really just resonates with me, and I just love the book,” she continues.
“I think it was very clear at that time to Warner Bros. that it was a very castable movie with two big female stars, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, and they signed on to develop the script.”
While it was exciting, Di Novi admits it was “incredibly unusual” for the time.
“It was the days where the female characters were usually the wife or girlfriend or something, and it was very tough to get a movie made with one female lead, let alone all of them. So we had kind of a tough reception. It was also a time when 98% of critics were men, who didn’t really click with the movie, so it did not get great reviews.”
The movie also portrayed a range of emotions and “tonal shifts” in the characters, which she notes was also “unusual” for the time.
“I think that has really changed where audiences are a lot more sophisticated now and kind of want the movies to cover a lot of emotional landscape,” she says. “But what happened was, over all these years and starting with streaming, the movie became a major cult phenomenon.”
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Di Novi also credits TikTok and Instagram for allowing fans to single out the moments they love and share them with the world.
“I’d say in the last 10, 15 years, it just became incredible how rabid the fan base was for this movie was,” she tells PEOPLE. “Even Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman started noticing that at red carpets or at events or whatever, that fans would be like, ‘When are you making the sequel to Practical Magic?’ It just kind of took on a life of its own.”
With heightened interest in a sequel, Di Novi knew they had a real chance, and once again, she had faith.
“We all pretty much at the same time, I guess it was maybe three years ago, said, ‘I think it’s time to give the fans what they want and make a sequel to this film.’ “
Coming back together for Practical Magic 2, which hits theaters in September, has a “magical feeling of destiny to it,” not just for Di Novi, but the whole team.
“It’s incredibly rewarding for all of us because we loved our first movie so much and it did okay. It didn’t do terrible. It did okay, but we loved the movie so much,” she shares. “What’s great about it is the endurance of the movie and how beloved it is. It did not come from publicity or advertising or whatever. It came from the people, and I think there’s something really important about that and really special that people when they love something, they love it and they share it with others.”
She continues, “To quote the positive message of the movie, ‘Love is the most important thing of all.’ And you cannot give up on that. You can never give up on that, and it needs to be the center of your life.”
She notes that the message still holds up today.
“That message is very powerful for people, and they really supported the movie for all these years,” Di Novi says. “And we have three, four generations of people, mostly women, but people saying like, ‘I watch that movie every few months,’ ‘I watch it with my daughter,’ ‘I watch it with my grandmother.’ It’s something that women and men share together, and they have their margarita parties, and we see things where people use the lines from the movie in their weddings.”
“It’s just become such a phenomenon, and it is very, very special, very moving for us, all the people that work so hard to create it.”
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will release Practical Magic on 4K UHD for the first time on Aug. 25, 2026. Practical Magic 2 debuts in theaters on Sept. 11, 2026.
Read the original article on People
