A Long Wait, a Cult Following, and a Sequel No One Asked Permission to Imagine
Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic built its audience the old-fashioned way: slowly, devotedly, through the kind of word-of-mouth that eventually turns a 1998 film adaptation into something people rewatch every October without being asked. The Owens sisters – and their magnificently strange aunts – became fixtures in a particular strain of literary fandom that skews toward Cape Cod fog, tequila at odd hours, and the firm belief that a well-cast spell beats a well-placed apology. Now, a sequel is actually coming, drawing from Hoffman’s 2021 follow-up novel The Book of Magic, and the groupchats are, by all available evidence, unhinged with anticipation.
Producer Denise Di Novi’s office, however, has not responded to every pitch that has ever landed on its doorstep. What follows is a record of three such pitches – none of them greenlit, all of them deeply considered – for the film that could have been Practical Magic 2. File these under fan fiction with structural ambitions.
Pitch One: Ghost Problems, Pancakes, and the Limits of Necromancy
The first rejected concept, titled Practical Magic 2: Ghostsisters, resurrects Jimmy Angelov – the vampire-coded, tequila-obsessed deadbeat who terrorized the Owens household in the original – through a botched spell cast by Antonia, the brown-haired Millennial witch of the family. Her intended target was her late great-aunt Jet, recently deceased. What she gets instead is Jimmy, who turns out to have spent the afterlife nursing a grudge and a taste for sister blood spiked into tequila. The man has not grown.
The island descends into a full ghost plague. Antonia, described here as inheriting her mother Sally’s power alongside her aunt Gillian’s spectacular lack of discipline, drives the inciting incident by doing exactly what no one in the Owens line should ever do: raise the dead. The fix requires assembling a coven, burying assorted hatchets, and calling in the deus ex matriarch herself – the ancestral Maria – from somewhere beyond the veil.
The B-plot concerns Sally’s marital geometry. Her late husband, a fruit vendor, rises from the dead only to find he has been replaced by a state trooper named Gary Hallet, the federal agent Sally fell for at the end of the first film. The proposed resolution to this domestic haunting is a supernatural pancake flipping contest, which settles Sally’s heart in a manner the pitch declines to specify further. This is, frankly, the most intriguing unresolved detail of the three concepts, and the only one involving breakfast food.
Pitch Two: Reproductive Rights, Belladonna, and an Oscar Bid
Practical Magic 2: Widow’s Bae is the most politically direct of the three rejected pitches, and also the one that invokes Stevie Nicks as a proposed top-to-bottom scorer. Set in 2026, it positions Gillian as running an underground reproductive healthcare operation – a nod to Hoffman’s original novel, in which the aunts engage with reproductive medicine as part of the witch-aligned professional tradition. The magic, the pitch notes pointedly, is extra practical this time around.
The conflict triangulates between Gillian’s growing community standing, Sally’s jealousy of that standing, and Special Agent Gary Hallet’s instinct to enforce the law – an instinct that proves fatal when a banishing spell goes sideways during a clinic raid. Hallet dies. The family fractures across generational lines. Young Kylie has enlisted her aunt’s services without telling her parents, which deepens the divide. The pitch concludes by asking whether Sally can summon the grace to fight for something larger than herself, or whether self-medicating with belladonna will finish her off this time. It then describes the entire thing as “Oscar-worthy stuff, Denise,” which is either a sign of confidence or a negotiating tactic.
Pitch Three: The Dove-Lancer Returns, and She Is Not Well
The third concept, Practical Magic 2: Obsession, follows up on a minor character from the original – the woman who lances a dove for the love of a Patriots fan described as “straight outta central casting.” Twenty years on, the lured lover has not chilled out. This, predictably, has driven her to madness, to megalomania, and into the arms of witchcraft, which she was not originally equipped to handle responsibly.
The pitch refers to her as “let’s-call-her” without completing the thought, which is either a deliberate stylistic choice or where the document was cut off. Either way, the premise holds: obsessive love, poorly executed magic, and two decades of accumulated resentment are a specific kind of dangerous. The original film gestured at this territory in its subplot about the dove, then moved on. This concept wants to stay there, in the damage, and examine what happens to the women the Owens sisters never quite saved.
What connects all three pitches is a shared fidelity to the original film’s actual concerns – grief, sisterhood, power used badly, power used well, and the uncomfortable overlap between the two. Hoffman’s 1998 adaptation became a cult classic not because of its special effects but because it treated witchcraft as a metaphor for female autonomy that sometimes backfires, sometimes saves everyone, and always costs something. The rejected pitches understand that, even when they’re proposing pancake contests to resolve love triangles with ghosts.
The actual Practical Magic 2 pulls its plot from The Book of Magic, Hoffman’s 2021 sequel novel, and it arrives with the weight of twenty-five years of fan investment behind it. Di Novi’s office will not be taking further submissions. But somewhere in the archive of what didn’t get made, a supernatural pancake flipping contest is still quietly waiting for its moment.
The dove-lancer, meanwhile, has not been accounted for.
