The Devil Wears Prada 2 stormed the box office with $77 million in domestic ticket sales in its opening weekend, then added $156.6 million overseas to finish at $233.6 million worldwide. That made the sequel the weekend’s only major new release and gave it the fourth-best start of the year.
The opening is a sharp lift from the first film, which debuted with $27.5 million domestically in 2006 before reaching $326 million globally. Disney’s 20th Century Studios made the sequel for roughly $100 million before worldwide marketing costs, with director David Frankel saying the budget mostly went to the cast. He brought back screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, while Anne Hathaway returned as Andy Sachs, Meryl Streep came back as Miranda Priestly, and Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci also reprised their roles after 20 years. Audiences gave the film an A- on CinemaScore exit polls.
That scale matters because sequels to prestige comedies do not usually launch this hard, especially two decades after the original became a cultural touchstone for lines such as “gird your loins!” and “by all means, move at a glacial pace.” The first film, adapted from Lauren Weisberg’s 2003 novel about working as an assistant to a Vogue boss widely seen as echoing Anna Wintour, grew from a sharp hit into a lasting reference point. This time, the story is set two decades later, with Andy Sachs back at Runway as a features editor under Miranda Priestly, and the audience response appears stronger than the reviews.
That split is the one wrinkle in an otherwise clean victory. Critics were mixed, but moviegoers showed up anyway, which is exactly the kind of gap studios hope for when they spend big on familiar characters instead of a brand-new idea. David A. Gross, who follows the industry, called the result unusually strong for the genre and said audiences, mostly female, can’t get enough. The weekend also showed how crowded the rest of the market was behind it: Michael finished second with $54 million in its second weekend, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie took in $12.1 million in its fourth weekend, and Project Hail Mary added $8.5 million in its seventh.
The real answer for the franchise is already on the board. The first film never needed a sequel to justify itself, but the sequel has now matched nostalgia with scale, and it did so with a launch that suggests the audience for Miranda Priestly was never just a memory. If this holds, The Devil Wears Prada 2 will be remembered less as a sequel than as proof that some box office brands return bigger than they left.
