Practical Magic 2 is being judged against a forecast that was raised two days before release

Practical Magic 2 opened to $30,002,526 from 4,146 theatres. The number that keeps getting set against it is $40–50 million, and that comparison is quietly unfair in a way that makes the actual story less interesting than it should be.

Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast, filed on 14 August, put the film at $30–40 million. Its weekend preview, published 9 September — two days before release — raised that to $40–50 million.

So the tracking went up in the final week, and the film then landed $2,526 above the floor of the original August range. Not a collapse against an early prediction. A film that met the low end of its first forecast, after the industry talked itself into a better one.

The $28 million figure was never a competing report

Three numbers circulated for the same weekend and they are routinely presented as outlets disagreeing. They are one outlet updating itself.

• Saturday afternoon, 12 September: TheWrap reported a $13 million opening day and projected "a lackluster $28 million to $30 million" weekend.
• The same outlet then published "$30 Million Opening."
• World of Reel, meanwhile, ran "$29M+."
• Variety and Deadline both said $30 million.

The actual figure came in at $30,002,526. The round "$30 million" was right to within two and a half thousand dollars. The $28 million was the low end of a Saturday projection built on Friday actuals, superseded within a day by the outlet that published it. Citing it now as a rival report is citing a forecast as a result.

Where it actually stands

• Opening weekend $30,002,526 on 4,146 theatres, a per-theatre average of $7,236. Released Friday 11 September, with $4.7 million in Thursday previews rolled into a $12.5 million first day.
• Second weekend $12,158,856, down 59 per cent, on 4,163 theatres.
• Domestic to date $50,987,261. International $27.4 million. Worldwide $78,387,261.
• The opening represents 58.8 per cent of the domestic total so far — a heavily front-loaded shape.
• Budget reported at $75 million net. Rotten Tomatoes 37 per cent, Metacritic 44 from 40 critics, CinemaScore B+.

A 59 per cent second-weekend drop off a 58.8 per cent front load points to a domestic finish somewhere in the high fifties — a film that opened at the bottom of its August range and then behaved like a film that opened at the bottom of its August range.

The 1998 original was not a bomb because of its multiple

The sequel has been framed repeatedly as following "a 28-year-old box office bomb." The original took $46,850,558 domestically and $68,336,997 worldwide against a $60 million production budget. That is 1.14 times its negative cost.

A 1.14x gross-to-budget ratio is not, by itself, the arithmetic of a bomb — plenty of films sit there and break even. What makes the case is the split: studios keep roughly half of domestic rentals and considerably less of international, which puts the 1998 film somewhere near $32 million in actual rentals against a $60 million negative, before a cent of marketing. That is the mechanism, and it is worth stating, because "it only made 1.1x its budget" is the kind of sentence that gets repeated by people who have not worked out what it means.

Worth noting: the film's own encyclopedia entry does not call it a bomb, and gives its budget as a range of $60–75 million. On the higher figure the case is stronger, not weaker.

One date, two answers

Databases list the US release as either 10 or 11 September. The 10th was Thursday previews; the 11th was the Friday wide release. The industry-standard convention is the Friday, and using the Thursday quietly breaks any per-day arithmetic built on top of it.

What is still unknown

The real net budget, since "$75 million net" is a reported figure and the word "net" is doing unspecified work. Whether the international run has legs. And what the forecast revision was actually based on — tracking services do not publish their inputs, which is why a number that moves ten million dollars in three weeks gets treated as information rather than as an estimate.

The film missed. It just missed a smaller number than the one it is being blamed for, and it missed it by $2,526 in the wrong direction.