Where was Practical Magic 2 filmed? The whole witchy island is England in disguise
The Owens sisters' New England seaside town has a new secret, and it's a postcode. Not one frame of the sequel was shot in America.
The short answer: England, all of it. Practical Magic 2 shot from July 18 to September 13, 2025, based at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in Hertfordshire — the Harry Potter complex — with location work spread across the UK: London, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, the Epping Ongar Railway in Essex, and Old Wardour Castle in Wiltshire.
The headline trick is the town itself. The sunlit seaside village where Sandra Bullock was photographed in August 2025 is Worcester Park — a suburb on the London–Surrey border, transformed into a Hamptons-style coastal town for the shoot. The curse-origin scenes at the ruined Lockland Manor used Old Wardour Castle, a hexagonal 14th-century ruin that genre fans have seen before: it played Kevin Costner's home base in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Why the production left America behind
The story gave the move its cover. Susanne Bier's sequel, written by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel from Alice Hoffman's 2021 novel The Book of Magic, sends the Owens family — Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, and Dianne Wiest, plus Joey King and Maisie Williams as Sally's daughters — from Massachusetts to an English village to trace the family curse to its source. Half the movie is set in England, so England won the whole shoot.
The other half of the explanation is that the "real" American locations barely existed in the first place. The original 1998 film shot its town scenes in Coupeville, on Washington's Whidbey Island, where the production painted Front Street white to pass for New England — and the famous Victorian house on the bluff was a temporary shell built on private land, dismantled after filming, with interiors done on a Los Angeles soundstage.
The beloved Owens house from 1998 was a facade torn down 27 years ago. The sequel didn't abandon a real place; it swapped one illusion for another.
Coupeville noticed anyway. Local officials spent 2025 fielding questions about why the sequel skipped them, and the town's chamber of commerce is openly hoping the release still sends film tourists to Whidbey Island, where fans have made pilgrimages for decades.
Did the disguise work?
Commercially, half. The film premiered in London on August 26, 2026, opened September 10, and took No. 1 with $30 million — enough to end Spider-Man: Brand New Day's long run at the top, but under the $40 million Deadline had projected, and Variety filed it under "fizzles."
Critically, the magic math came out strange: 38% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes against a B+ CinemaScore from audiences — a better grade than the 1998 original's B–. The first film pulled the same split, got rescued by cable reruns and Halloween rewatches, and became a classic anyway. This franchise has never needed critics, or, as it turns out, America.
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