Warner Bros wanted $18 million to $23 million from Practical Magic 2's international rollout. It got $16 million. Add the $30 million domestic number and the sequel to Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman's 1998 cult favourite opens worldwide at $46 million, per Deadline. Good enough for first place. Not good enough to feel like a win.

The math is the problem. The film cost roughly $75 million to make, before the marketing spend that studios rarely disclose. Theatre owners keep about half of ticket sales. Variety's numbers put that squarely in the red for now, and the road to break-even runs through the next several weekends, not this one.

The overseas breakdown tells its own story. Best market was the UK at $3.9 million, tracking close to Bullock's The Lost City. Australia beat expectations. But France came in at $569,000, well under Lost City's $2.5 million there, and Mexico's $1.2 million trailed both Lost City and Freakier Friday. Deadline's read: this was always a cult 1990s property built around English-speaking audiences, never designed to be a Devil Wears Prada 2-sized event.

Critics weren't kind, 37% on Rotten Tomatoes by Sunday morning. Audiences disagreed hard, a 92% audience score, 4.5 out of 5 on PostTrak and a B+ CinemaScore. That gap between the people who reviewed it and the people who paid for it is where Warner Bros will look for its rebound. Variety notes the opening crowd skewed older and female, meaning Practical Magic 2 found its core but didn't pull in anyone new.

Context makes this sting more. Adjusted for inflation, the domestic haul is close to what the 1998 original made in its own disappointing debut, before it became a decades-long favourite on home video. Warner Bros will hope for a similar afterlife, just faster, and with a lot more money on the table this time.

It also arrives in the middle of a rough patch for the studio. Variety counts this as the fourth misfire in a run that includes The End of Oak Street, Supergirl and The Bride!. Next up is Tom Cruise's Digger in October, carrying a budget near $130 million. That one can't afford a similar shortfall.

Meanwhile the frame's real headline sits elsewhere. Spider-Man: Brand New Day slid to No. 2 with $8.6 million but crossed into history books anyway, its $935 million domestic cume set to overtake The Force Awakens' $936 million by Tuesday and become the biggest domestic release ever, unadjusted for inflation. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, now past $1.68 billion globally, keeps quietly beating Spider-Man on the worldwide chart most weekends too.

For Practical Magic 2, the next checkpoint is obvious. Word of mouth carried by that B+ grade needs to hold through a second and third weekend, because nostalgia alone got it to No. 1, not past it.