With modern movies, anything that’s a sequel or something with a recognizable name seems disproportionately likely to get made, whereas the trickle of new IPs is few and far in between. The issue is, not every film needs a sequel, with belated sequels often being the worst of the bunch (think “Terminator: Genisys” or “Independence Day: Resurgence”).

Still, sometimes they can reinvent a franchise in surprising new ways (“Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” “Split,” “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”). The best of these films seem to have a good balance between revisiting nostalgia and clearing a path for the next generation, with “Cobra Kai” perhaps being the best example of this, albeit in the form of a TV show.

“Hocus Pocus 2” could have gone either way. The original 1993 theatrical film starring the villainous witches, the Sanderson sisters, was a flop at the box office, but it gained traction from frequent Halloween season airings on Disney Channel, which is how I grew up with it. Among the standard Disney Channel fair, it stands out because of the strength of its leads (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy) and its connection to the holiday. It was in frequent circulation like other Disney Channel classics like the “Halloweentown” movies, “Freaky Friday” and “The Luck of the Irish.”

“Hocus Pocus 2” takes place 29 years after the original, set in its release year around Halloween in Salem. It stars fresh leads in high schoolers Becca (Whitney Peak) and Izzy (Belissa Escobedo), who feel like they’re fresh off the set of a Disney Channel sitcom, which doesn’t mean their performances are bad, but they are a bit wooden with forced dialogue.

All is well until their Halloween shopkeeper friend, Gilbert (Sam Richardson), who is an amateur magician, tricks them into burning a black flame candle that resurrects the Sanderson sisters for one night only. It turns out them exploding in the last film wasn’t quite finale enough.

We’re introduced to younger versions of the witches in the 1600s (Taylor Paige Henderson as young Winifred Sanderson, Juju Brener as young Sarah Sanderson and Nina Kitchen as young Mary Sanderson), where they discover a spell that could make them all-powerful, which they seek out in 2022 to up the stakes. But along the way, Becca and Izzy discover they have powers, complicating the sisters’ plans to acquire plot armor.

I don’t have many complaints about the performances. They’re not good, but they’re just exactly what I expected. Midler, Parker and Najimy feel just out of 1993 albeit a bit older — they’re just given nothing to work with as the script constantly sees their characters undermined and distracted in embarrassing ways. At one point, they go to a Walgreens and we spend at least 10 minutes on bad product placement gags before the film mercifully moves on — though the sisters do acquire a Roomba that follows them throughout the film.

The younger Sanderson sisters arguably have more standout performances and their story is also more relatable — we see them before they became witches and how they were needlessly persecuted for rejecting the strict Puritanical rules of Salem at the time, which drives them to eventually find acceptance with an older witch (Hannah Waddingham). The older Sandersons have nothing to do other than to retread their goals of surviving past morning in the first film.

Gilbert is the weakest character at no fault of Richardson; he’s horrendously written. He’s a Sanderson sister fanboy, but that type of character only works if he’s either a villain or a buffoon, given that the Sandersons kill children to stay young. The film goes with the latter, making Gilbert someone who knows all there is to know about the Sandersons except for the child murder part.

“Hocus Pocus 2” is a belated sequel that didn’t need to happen and probably shouldn’t have. Given that Disney had 29 years to peruse scripts, I expected a much better one than this. It feels like this was a rush job to fill Disney Plus’ library and it is completely overshadowed and undermined by bad comedy, painfully unwatchable musical numbers and distracting product placement.

“Hocus Pocus” is a a franchise that should have remained buried.

“Hocus Pocus 2” gets a 4/10