'The Devil Wears Prada 2' Just Outgrossed Its 20-Year-Old Original in 10 Days

In ten days at the box office, The Devil Wears Prada 2 did something the original spent its entire 2006 theatrical run trying to do: gross more than $144 million in U.S. ticket sales. The 20th Century Studios sequel hit that mark by the close of its second weekend, May 10, having opened to $77 million domestically and $233.6 million worldwide on May 1. Disney now heads into the May 15–17 Mother’s Day weekend expecting the film to lead the U.S. box office for a third straight session.

The original Devil Wears Prada — David Frankel’s June 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s roman à clef — opened to $27.5 million in 2006 and grossed $124.7 million domestically and $326.5 million globally over its entire theatrical run. The sequel passed those domestic and global lifetime totals inside its first ten days, according to weekend grosses reported by Deadline, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter. By any honest measure of how legacy sequels typically perform two decades after the original, the result is an outlier.

The cultural question worth taking seriously is what kind of audience showed up — and what it says about who Hollywood can still reliably bring back to theaters.

A 76 percent female opening — and almost no one under 25

The audience makeup, as reported through PostTrak exit polling, was strikingly narrow on the gender axis and unusually old on the age axis. Women accounted for 76 percent of opening-weekend ticket buyers, according to data cited by TheWrap and Variety — one of the most gender-skewed wide openings in recent memory for a film not marketed explicitly as a niche release.

The age curve was even more telling. The largest single demographic at opening was women aged 25 to 34, who made up 28 percent of the audience — meaning nearly three in ten ticket buyers were children when the original Prada came out in 2006. Fifty-eight percent of opening-weekend buyers were over 35. Women under 25 were just 12 percent. Men under 25 came in at 2 percent.

PostTrak gave the film a 4.5-out-of-5 audience score, and 74 percent of attendees told the firm they would “definitely recommend” the movie to a friend, TheWrap reported. CinemaScore — the separate exit-poll firm — graded it A-minus. Both metrics put the sequel in the band where word-of-mouth tends to extend theatrical runs.

That demographic profile matters because it tells the studio what worked. Prada 2 was not a viral hit with the under-25 crowd Hollywood typically chases with action and animated tentpoles. It was a millennial film, watched by women who were teenagers or young adults when the original was new and who now have disposable income and a reason to go to a movie theater again.

The “battle of the sequels” went one way

The opening-weekend numbers gain context once placed against the rest of the early summer slate. Disney moved Prada 2 into the May 1 release date the studio had originally reserved for Avengers: Doomsday, fast-tracking the comedy after early test screenings reportedly went well. The bet was that the date — the unofficial start of summer, a frame Marvel had locked down for a decade — would carry a non-superhero release as effectively as it had carried the comic-book ones.

It did. The following weekend, May 8–10, Warner Bros.’s Mortal Kombat II opened to $38.7 million against Prada 2’s second-weekend hold of $41 million. Rotten Tomatoes framed it as a “battle of the sequels”; Deadline called the Prada 2 hold “better than many of the opening weekends of films starting over Mother’s Day.” A 44 percent drop in the second weekend, against an opening that large, is the kind of curve studios use to justify greenlighting more of the same.

Over the same Mother’s Day frame this weekend, Prada 2 is positioned to outdraw both Mortal Kombat II’s sophomore session and the holdover Michael Jackson biopic Michael, according to Boxoffice Pro’s weekend preview. Industry projections put domestic ticket sales for the summer season on track to clear $4.5 billion, a 24 percent jump over summer 2025’s $3.6 billion total. A real chunk of that gap is sequels and reboots aimed at audiences old enough to have nostalgia for the originals.

Why Hollywood is calling it a vindication — cautiously

The Frankel sequel’s success is being read inside the industry as proof that the IP machine still works for a specific audience under specific conditions. Fortune’s coverage of the opening called the result “the last great victory for Hollywood’s IP machine,” a framing that captures both the win and the worry. The win is concrete. The worry is that the conditions are harder to replicate than they look.

Three things lined up for Prada 2 that don’t always line up. Original director Frankel returned, as did original screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. The principal cast — Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, Emily Blunt as Emily Charlton, and Stanley Tucci as Nigel — all came back. And the premise picked up where the first one ended without trying to reboot the universe or hand the franchise to a younger ensemble. The sequel resumes 20 years later, with Hathaway’s Andy returning to Runway as a features editor under Streep’s editor-in-chief.

That continuity of creative team and cast is rare. Most legacy sequels lose at least one element — a director, a lead actor, a writer with the original sensibility — to scheduling, money, or studio politics. Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) and Sony’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) are recent examples that opened to a fraction of what Prada 2 did despite higher-profile marketing campaigns. The difference, industry observers have argued, was a coherent creative team executing a single vision rather than a corporate handoff.

The opening for Prada 2 also set a personal record for two of its stars. The $77 million domestic gross is the highest opening weekend of either Meryl Streep’s or Emily Blunt’s careers, according to data cited by Variety. Streep’s previous high was the 2008 Mamma Mia! opening of $27.6 million. Blunt’s was the 2020 release of A Quiet Place Part II’s pandemic-impacted opening. The new mark, set by a comedy sequel with both actresses two decades older than the roles they originated, is a data point Hollywood’s casting executives are likely studying.

What it means for the rest of the summer

The Mother’s Day weekend ahead is also a referendum on how durable the audience is. A third weekend at No. 1 against Mortal Kombat II’s hold and the rollout of new Mother’s Day counter-programming would push the film’s domestic cume past $180 million on a film whose production budget has been reported in trade press at roughly $75 million.

That math — a sub-$80 million budget against an opening that grossed nearly as much as the original earned in eight months — is the kind of profitability Disney and 20th Century Studios will use to argue for more sequels rooted in 20-year-old IP. The studio’s slate for late 2026 and 2027 already includes Toy Story 5, Moana (live-action), Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, and a Spider-Man reboot tilted toward audiences who came of age on the Tobey Maguire trilogy. Each lands at a different point on the nostalgia curve, but each is built on the same theory Prada 2 just proved at the box office: that millennials, especially millennial women, will reliably buy tickets to a theater experience that returns them to a specific 2006-to-2010 cultural moment with the original creative team in place.

The risk that case is harder to make as the slate gets thinner. Prada 2’s unusual creative continuity isn’t a template most legacy sequels can match. The Cannes Film Festival opened on May 13 with no major Hollywood studio competing for the Palme d’Or for the first time since 2017, a story this site covered last week as Hollywood’s deliberate retreat from the prestige festival circuit. The studios cut their international auteur exposure and bet harder on franchise IP. Prada 2 is what that bet looks like when it wins.

It is also what it looks like when the buyer is a 32-year-old woman who remembers Andy Sachs’s makeover scene from a 2006 sleepover. The rest of summer 2026 — Toy Story 5, Moana, The Mandalorian and Grogu, Spider-Man: Brand New Day — will say whether that buyer’s wallet stretches further than this one film. Disney’s stock-and-flow over the next four months depends on it.

Studios that have spent the past year debating whether to stake a $200 million budget on the next Marvel release or the next adaptation will have noticed something specific about Prada 2’s opening. The film didn’t depend on a fan-service Easter-egg ecosystem. It didn’t depend on a viral social-media moment in the way 2026’s TikTok-driven product cycles have. It depended on a single creative team finishing a story 20 years later for an audience that had aged into the demographic that buys the most movie tickets per capita. That’s a narrower kind of win than Hollywood’s IP machine usually claims — narrower, too, than what the studios that have walked away from AI partnerships like Disney’s now-scrapped OpenAI Sora deal had been hoping to engineer. But it’s a real win, and the studios trying to manufacture the next $200 million sequel are very likely now studying how it was built.