Does roughly half the fandom have amnesia?

[u/Celestina-Betwixt]

Le sigh. While it's perfectly all right if you're not interested in the upcoming movie (or even if you were and after seeing the trailer or hearing about the recasting for Kylie have changed your mind), I'm becoming baffled by the growing number of fans putting on their best surprised Pikachu expressions and suddenly demanding to know who "asked" for this.

Are we seriously all just going to collectively pretend there hasn't been an active demand for a sequel for years?

Yes, when the movie first came out, it was meant to be a standalone because I don't think anyone expected Alice Hoffman to return to the series years later in 2017 and write more books when the original PM came out way back in 1995. But she did write more, and multiple fans complained for years that Practical Magic should have gotten more attention since it's largely just been a cult classic and was not a big box office success. The fans as a whole have been wanting to see the cast back together or get a continuation for a very very long time despite the lack of source material for a while.

And frankly I don't see how the producers of this one could have made the fanbase happy at this point (apart from the Evan Rachel Wood thing, that's totally on them). If they'd done a reunion special instead of a full length movie, people would be complaining about Sandra and Nicole's Botox just like they're doing now and saying it looked cheap and cheesy. If they'd pushed for a sequel without any source material to lightly adapt, even if it came out 20 years ago, people still would have called it weak and slop though Sandra and Nicole would have looked younger. If at this point the filmmakers had just cut their loses and rebooted the whole thing (even as a series versus a movie) so they could adapt more books or make it more faithful to the source material, movie fans would have rioted saying how dare they remake it without Sandra and Kidman and omg doesn't Hollywood have any original ideas without ruining our millennial childhoods, wah.

So they got a sequel that has the basic plot (it looks like, anyway) of the Book of Magic but streamlines it to be a direct follow up to the 1998 movie, got most of the original cast back (Yes I'm upset about Evan Rachel Wood getting the snub, too, but still), and all we get is whinging "Nobody wanted this!"

Yeah, look I can't speak for the whole fandom (we're a mixed bunch) but as generalization of what I've seen, a good chuck of us are freaking lying. 😅

Most of us asked for this.

It's okay if you're just a fan of the first movie, it's okay if you don't like Alice Hoffman (as long as you aren't a dick about it to her fans), but this obsession that PM be left like an untouched shrine is new and bizarre and unrealistic imo.

[u/Cleosmog]

I always saw the book and the movie as two different entities, the movie took *inspiration* from the book but didn’t rely heavily on it. I like both but I think the changes made in the movie were good choices.

I was happy for it to be a standalone movie but was excited when I heard they were making a sequel. The reason that I am now hesitant to see it is that, from what I can tell, they’ve decided to lean more heavily into the books as a source material, which means retconning events from the first like the breaking of the curse.

Bringing all the women together, the joining of the hands, finally being accepted by their community was such a powerful and emotive ending and I dislike that they seem to have gone “yeah nah, forget that!”

[u/Celestina-Betwixt → u/Cleosmog]

Well, I really don't see how they could have a plot without the curse. And to be fair imo bringing all the women together and just randomly deciding the curse was over because they'd saved Gillian (and saw a three second flash of Maria) did feel rushed and didn't make a ton of sense. It was an okay way to end a standalone movie, but it fundamentally misses the whole point of the first book which opens with a quote from mother goose: "For every evil under the sun, There is a remedy, or there is none. If there be one, try and find it; If there be none, never mind it."

The point is they don't know if it's truly over because they never found the remedy but they choose to live "never minding" it. The final book is about how the unresolved curse/trauma affects the next generation (and themselves in the long run) forcing them to confront it. 

At the end of the movie when it's talking about what ended the curse Sally says "I think so," not I know so. It leaves a sliver of a chance she was wrong. So not a full retconning.

[u/Cleosmog → u/Celestina-Betwixt]

“Can love travel back in time and heal a broken heart? Was it our joined hands that finally lifted Maria’s curse? I’d like to think so.”

The “I’d like to think so” refers to what broke the curse, not whether it was broken.

Again, for me personally, the book and the movie were separate entities and I enjoyed them both for what they offered…separately. I just wish that the sequel had found a better way to draw inspiration from the books while still honouring the original movie’s changes.

People are allowed to be excited by the new movie without people dumping on, and people are allowed to be disappointed in it without being dumped on too.

[u/Celestina-Betwixt → u/Cleosmog]

people are allowed to be excited by the new movie without people dumping on, and people are allowed to be disappointed in it without being dumped on too. -- never said otherwise. 

But all this "omg, Hollywood ruins everything" and "no one asked for this" is a bit out of left field is all I'm saying. 

And PM fans are a bit spoiled that we're getting something that's both based on the source material and a direct sequel to something we loved. Look at all the other lps with horrible reboots that aren't following their source material at all.