Devil Wears Prada 2 opens to $77M

The box office story here is simple on the surface — a sequel to a 2006 fashion movie opened huge. But the reason people in Hollywood care is more specific. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” didn’t just win the weekend. It posted a $77 million domestic debut and about $233.6 million worldwide, which is far above the kind of launch most people expected from a female-skewing legacy sequel. Why is that surprising? Because this wasn’t sold as a superhero movie, a horror breakout, or a four-quadrant animated event. It was a glossy adult studio sequel built around Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci, arriving almost 20 years after the original. Those movies can absolutely work, but they usually open on nostalgia plus good reviews and then build. This one came out swinging on day one. How big is $77 million, really? Big enough to rank as the fourth-largest domestic opening weekend of 2026 so far. Only “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Michael,” and “Project Hail Mary” opened higher this year. It also crushed the original “The Devil Wears Prada,” which opened to $27.5 million back in 2006. So this isn’t a modest sequel doing respectable business — it’s a genuine event launch. What pushed it that high? A couple of things lined up at once. The brand was already strong with millennials who grew up on the first movie, but the audience apparently widened beyond pure nostalgia. Deadline noted more than $10 million in Thursday previews, and EntTelligence estimated roughly 5 million admissions in North America for the weekend. That tells you turnout was broad, not just superfans rushing opening night. Why does the worldwide number matter so much? Because $233.6 million globally changes the conversation from “nice domestic win” to “real franchise-scale commercial hit.” International markets delivered about $156.6 million of that opening frame, meaning the sequel didn’t depend on North America alone. Italy was especially strong, and the movie opened at No. 1 in most major markets. That kind of overseas support is what turns a buzzy opening into a durable studio success. So is this just one good weekend, or something bigger? Basically, it looks like the first clear summer win for a very specific kind of movie — a star-driven, adult-friendly studio release that isn’t hiding inside a bigger action template. Variety framed the weekend as a sign that theaters are “en vogue again,” which is a little cute, but the underlying point is real: audiences showed up in force for a movie business conventional wisdom often underrates. What’s the catch? Opening big is not the same as having long legs. A movie like this needs strong week-to-week holds, because its audience can front-load if nostalgia is doing a lot of the work. And the summer corridor gets much more crowded from here. That means the next two weekends matter almost as much as this one if you’re trying to judge whether “Prada 2” becomes merely a hit or one of the defining theatrical runs of the season. Why are people also watching Meryl Streep’s record here? Because this appears to be the biggest opening weekend of her career. That’s the kind of stat that sounds trivia-sized, but it helps explain why the launch is getting so much attention. A sequel arriving two decades later isn’t supposed to reset the commercial ceiling for one of its stars. Turns out this one did. The bottom line is that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” didn’t just open well. It broke out. And if it holds, it could become the movie that proves there’s still a very large theatrical audience for smart, glossy, adult studio entertainment — not as counterprogramming, but as the main event.