The Devil Wears Prada 2 stormed to $77 million in North America and $233 million worldwide over the weekend, a launch that put the sequel on track to outgross the original film’s lifetime total by the end of the month. The debut was the second-best worldwide start of the year, behind Universal’s animated The Super Mario Galaxy Movie at $372.5 million and ahead of the Michael Jackson biopic Michael at $217 million.
For Disney, the numbers are hard to ignore. The studio spent roughly $100 million making the movie and about $80 million marketing it, a big bet that paid off immediately as audiences gave the film an A- on CinemaScore exit polls and women made up 76% of the crowd. David A. Gross called it “a sensational opening for a comedy-drama” and said “very few dramedies do this kind of business once, let alone a second time that’s bigger.”
The opening lands 20 years after the first The Devil Wears Prada became a cultural touchstone. That 2006 film launched to $27.5 million domestically, well below this weekend’s sequel haul, and the new movie brings back Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci with David Frankel directing again from a script by Aline Brosh McKenna. The sequel picks up as Andy Sachs returns to Runway magazine as a features editor under Miranda Priestly, a setup that restores the office power struggle that made the story last in the first place.
Streep’s return also gives the release an extra layer of event value. She had not been seen on the big screen since Greta Gerwig’s Little Women in 2019 except for some voice work, and her last starring role before the sequel was Steven Spielberg’s The Post in 2017. The result is not just a strong opening for a studio comedy-drama; it is proof that a franchise built on fashion, hierarchy and one of pop culture’s most quoted lines still has real box office force. If the sequel keeps moving at this pace, the bigger question is not whether it will catch the original, but how much higher Disney can push a property that still knows how to say, “That’s all” and “I’m one stomach flu away from my goal weight” to a paying crowd.
