Legacy Sequels and the Science of Nostalgia

Sept 23, 2026

Practical Magic 2 released this past weekend, with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman returning as the Owens sisters, two witches cursed with the eternal death of their lovers. As one AP report put it, the film "conjured a box-office victory this weekend, knocking a six-week reigning box office champion out of first place”. The box office numbers weren't surprising, the opening pulled in an estimated $30 million domestically. Add $16 million from overseas markets and you get a worldwide opening near $46 million, against a reported $75 million budget. The film made more than half the production cost back in a single weekend, and a big jump from the original, which opened to just $13.1 million back in 1998.

This isn't a fluke, it’s a formula, and Hollywood knows it very well. Welcome to the world of legacy sequels.

What is a legacy sequel?

A legacy sequel isn't just a sequel. It's the specific move of returning to a beloved franchise years, sometimes decades, after people assumed it was finished. Think Hocus Pocus 2, Top Gun: Maverick, the recent Star Wars trilogy, and Scream (2022). Now, we have Practical Magic 2.

Legacy sequels (or ‘legesequels’ as some may call them) are Hollywood returning to what they know best, a formula. Bring back at least one original cast member, ideally the ones audiences actually loved. Introduce a new generation of characters to pass the torch to. And pack the runtime with callbacks and needle-drops that longtime fans will catch. If you add all those up and you have a ‘legesequeal’. 

It's less a "sequel" and more a reunion. And like a reunion, people don't show up because the new material is groundbreaking. They show up because they want to feel something warm from the past. They want to feel nostalgia.

The Science Behind Why this Works

Legacy sequels lean heavily into nostalgia. Nostalgia isn't just a feeling, it's a documented psychological event that researchers have been studying for years.

When something emotionally significant happens to you, your brain attaches that feeling to a newly-formed memory. It’s like a label, so you can pull back up those feelings faster later. Your senses also influence this. A smell, a song, or even a certain color can act as a trigger that pulls up the original memory and feelings attached to it. What’s more interesting is that the recalled version often feels more intense than the original moment did at the time. This is because we often apply more significance and emotion to past memories as time goes on. An ordinary evening or a song playing in the background can end up meaning way more to you years later than it ever did in the moment. Hollywood knows this.

Furthermore, there’s real brain activity behind it. Nostalgia activates the amygdala and hippocampus, the parts of your brain responsible for emotion and memory, while also lighting up your reward system. That's the same system that responds to things like chocolate or winning money; the system corresponds with an actual dopamine release. So, nostalgia isn't just a nice feeling. Your brain is chemically rewarding you for remembering.

It's also worth pointing out that nostalgia wasn't always seen as a good thing. The word "nostalgia" was determined by a Swiss doctor in the 1600s, combining the Greek words for "home" and "pain”. So nostalgia literally meant the pain of wanting to go home. For about two centuries, doctors treated it as a real illness. It was serious enough that soldiers and people far from home were documented as having died from it. Only in recent decades has science switched its view, now treating nostalgia as a healthy emotion.

Now that nostalgia is seen as a good thing – and a thing that can bring in profit – the entertainment industry has fully capitalized on it. Sequels, requels, adaptations, and legacy sequels all utilize nostalgia to guarantee your money. 

Legacy Sequels are Nostalgia Delivery Systems

The reason legacy sequels are so profitable is because they prioritize nostalgia over the story itself. Practical Magic 2 doubles down on the original's cozy, autumnal, witchy sisterhood atmosphere – the exact mood people associated with the first film. Ghostbusters: Afterlife brought back the specific tone of ‘goofy-meets-spooky’ that made the original a comfort watch. Top Gun: Maverick rebuilt the adrenaline and the emotional beats almost exactly from the first one. All three ‘legesequels’ executed this to make fans feel like they were reliving the first one, and through this, the version of themself from back then.

None of this is accidental. Every callback, every returning actor, every needle-drop is a deliberately placed nostalgia trigger. 

Conclusion

Studios aren't leaning on nostalgia because they've run out of ideas. They're doing it because it works, and it works at a scale a brand new franchise almost never reaches. Top Gun: Maverick cleared $1 billion worldwide. The Jurassic World films have done the same, more than once. These aren't modest wins. They're some of the highest-grossing movies of the last decade, built almost entirely on audiences returning to something they already loved.

A new IP has to earn that kind of investment from scratch. A legacy sequel skips that step. It borrows decades of goodwill from an audience that already loves the IP, and it converts that goodwill into ticket sales.

This says something about the industry itself. When the safest bet is the one built on nostalgia, there's less incentive to take a chance on anything new. Hollywood isn’t just telling familiar stories. It's capitalizing on psychology and on a formula it knows how to sell, because risk is expensive. Legacy sequels are the safest bet there is.