Twenty years after a junior assistant first stumbled into Miranda Priestly's glass office, the runway is open again — and this time Hollywood is watching the box office as carefully as the catwalk. The Devil Wears Prada 2 rolled into theaters on May 1, 2026, and turned the opening weekend into a fashion statement of its own, with early tracking putting the sequel comfortably ahead of the late-2000s romantic comedies it grew up beside. For a sequel that took two decades to materialize, the bigger surprise is not that it showed up, but that it walked out swinging.
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What Happened
Disney's 20th Century Studios released The Devil Wears Prada 2 wide on Friday, May 1, after a Thursday-night preview round that already had analysts recalibrating their projections. The film picked up about ten million dollars from those previews alone, then opened to roughly thirty-three million dollars on Friday across more than four thousand North American screens. By Saturday morning, industry trackers at Deadline, Variety and Boxoffice Pro had aligned on a three-day weekend in the seventy-five to eighty million dollar range, with some bullish models nudging the figure toward triple digits if word of mouth continued to hold.
To put that in perspective, the 2006 original opened to roughly twenty-seven and a half million dollars on its way to a hundred and twenty-four million dollar domestic run and a global haul north of three hundred and twenty-six million. The sequel is on pace to clear the original's entire opening figure on its first day, which is the kind of math that turns a legacy comedy into a tentpole. It is also, by some distance, the largest opening ever recorded for a 2026 release that is not a franchise blockbuster, slotting in just behind the year's earlier biopic phenomenon and ahead of every comedy or female-led drama on the calendar.
Director David Frankel returned to steer the ship, with screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna also back from the original. The principal cast is essentially a reunion: Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, Anne Hathaway as Andrea Sachs, Emily Blunt as Emily Charlton, and Stanley Tucci as Nigel. The new wrinkles come from Justin Theroux and Kenneth Branagh, who join the magazine universe as fresh power players, and from a supporting bench that has already drawn knowing chatter on social platforms.
Why It Matters
This opening tells you a few things at once. First, it confirms that older audiences — the demographic studios spent most of the streaming wars insisting could not be moved out of their living rooms — will still buy tickets when something feels event-shaped. Saturday's exit polling skewed female and over thirty, the same audience that bought the original's DVDs, watched it on cable for years, and in the meantime made it one of the most quoted comedies of its decade. Disney's marketing leaned hard on that nostalgia, with the trailer reusing a snatch of the 2006 score and the magazine's fictional Runway recreated almost frame-for-frame for the first ten minutes.
Second, it is a real boost for a domestic box office that, even after a strong first quarter, has been hunting for a counter-programming win to pair with action and family fare. The April release calendar was dominated by Project Hail Mary, the still-running biopic about Michael Jackson, and a long tail from The Super Mario Galaxy. Adding a smart, dialogue-driven sequel into May gives multiplexes a different kind of audience to chase, and gives the summer the kind of broad-appeal hit it traditionally needs in early May.
Third, the run-up offers a rare data point on the value of a well-aged piece of intellectual property. The original Devil Wears Prada was a modest mid-budget project two decades ago. Its sequel arrives at a moment when studios are clearly testing how much equity sits in twenty-year-old hits — see also the recent revivals of late-1990s and early-2000s comedies — and the answer this weekend appears to be: more than they thought, provided the cast actually returns and the script is not phoned in.
Reaction
Critically, the response has been warm if not unanimous. The Tomatometer settled into solidly fresh territory soon after the embargo lifted, with reviewers pointing to Streep's performance as the film's anchoring asset and praising Hathaway's grown-up reframing of Andy. Some critics argued the script plays it safe with its central layoff plot, in which Andy's newsroom is fired by group text during an awards gala — a dramatic conceit that doubles as commentary on the modern media business. Others called the sequel a chic but slightly bland follow-up, more concerned with reuniting the band than redefining the genre. Even the harsher write-ups, however, conceded that the central trio still has obvious chemistry, and that two specific monologues from Streep are likely to bounce around social platforms for the rest of the year.
Audience scoring told a less ambiguous story. CinemaScore landed on a strong A-minus, and PostTrak exit-polling logged a high definite-recommend rate, both of which suggest the kind of word of mouth that protects a sequel through its second and third weekends. On TikTok and Instagram, fashion creators turned key scenes into instant edits, and the film's references to fictional brands within the magazine's universe set off mini trend cycles within hours. Variety and Deadline both noted that the older skew of the opening crowd actually helped, not hurt — older audiences tend to repeat-attend with friends and family rather than burning through ticket inventory in the first forty-eight hours.
For Disney, the reception is also a corporate validation. The Devil Wears Prada 2 was developed and released by 20th Century Studios, the label the company picked up in the Fox acquisition, and is one of the more prominent recent examples of that imprint's adult-skewing comedy and drama strategy paying off in the post-pandemic theatrical market.
What's Next
From here, the math gets more interesting. A second-weekend drop in the forty to fifty percent range would be considered healthy for a sequel of this size, and would almost certainly clear two hundred million dollars domestically by mid-June. Internationally, the film is rolling out across major European and Asian markets through the early summer, with India and parts of Southeast Asia already reporting strong first-day performance for a Hollywood release. Industry watchers like TheWrap have flagged Japan and Korea as particular swing markets, given the original's enduring streaming footprint there.
The streaming question is hovering as well. Disney has not officially set a Disney+ window, but recent comparable titles have moved to the service inside ninety days, and the studio has been telegraphing a nostalgia-friendly bundling strategy that pairs older catalog with new exclusives. Expect Devil Wears Prada 2 to surface alongside the 2006 original on Disney+ before the end of the summer, and expect the platform's recommendation engine to do a great deal of the heavy lifting in turning theatrical heat into long-tail subscription engagement.
Awards conversations are also creeping in earlier than usual. Streep, perpetually in the awards orbit, would be a serious supporting-actress contender if the studio chooses to campaign aggressively, and the film's costume design — already lighting up fashion press — has obvious traction with crafts voters. None of that is locked in yet, but a sequel comedy hitting the awards radar at all is unusual, and a sign of how thoroughly the original earned its place in the canon.
Closing Thoughts
What is most telling about this weekend is not the dollar figure, but the shape of it. A studio sequel anchored by women in their forties and seventies, releasing into a calendar dominated by superhero and family content, opened to roughly three times the original's first weekend without the help of a marketing gimmick or a streaming exclusivity hook. That outcome will almost certainly accelerate other long-dormant follow-ups already in development, from late-1990s romantic comedies to mid-2000s prestige dramas. Whether any of those projects can actually replicate this kind of reunion energy is a different question. The original Devil Wears Prada was a specific, well-cast, well-written object, and not every twenty-year-old film has Meryl Streep waiting in the wings.
For now, the takeaway is clean. Theatrical comedy — for grown-ups, with stakes, with returning faces — is not dead. It just needs a story worth coming back for, and a production willing to pay for the cast that made the first one matter. The Devil Wears Prada 2 did that, and the audience showed up. By Sunday night, the runway is going to be very crowded again.
한글 요약
20세기 스튜디오가 배급한 영화 악마는 프라다를 입는다 2가 5월 1일 북미 전역에서 공개돼 개봉 첫 주말 박스오피스 7,500만~8,000만 달러 수준의 성적을 예고했습니다. 목요일 프리뷰 1,000만 달러에 이어 금요일 하루에만 약 3,300만 달러를 벌어들였고, 4,000개가 넘는 스크린에서 동시 상영되며 2026년 들어 비프랜차이즈 영화로는 가장 큰 오프닝 중 하나로 기록됐습니다. 2006년 1편의 첫 주말 성적이 약 2,750만 달러였던 점을 감안하면, 속편이 단 하루 만에 원작의 오프닝 전체를 따라잡은 셈입니다.
메릴 스트립이 미란다 프리슬리 역으로 복귀하고, 앤 해서웨이가 성장한 앤디 삭스를, 에밀리 블런트와 스탠리 투치가 각각 에밀리와 나이절을 다시 연기합니다. 데이비드 프랭클 감독과 시나리오작가 알린 브로시 매케나가 동반 복귀했고, 저스틴 서룩스와 케네스 브래나가 새 인물로 합류해 잡지 업계의 권력 지형을 흔드는 캐릭터들을 맡았습니다. 줄거리는 시상식 도중 단체 문자 한 통으로 뉴스룸 전체가 해고되는 사건에서 출발해, 앤디가 다시 미란다의 잡지 런웨이에 발을 들이는 과정을 따라갑니다.
비평은 메릴 스트립의 연기를 중심으로 호평이 많고, 관객 평점은 시네마스코어 A-로 안정적입니다. 디즈니는 디즈니+ 공개 시점을 공식화하지 않았지만 90일 안팎 안에 스트리밍에 합류할 가능성이 높고, 인도와 동남아시아 등 해외 시장에서도 첫날 성적이 좋아 글로벌 흥행 잠재력이 큽니다. 어덜트 코미디·드라마가 극장에서 다시 통할 수 있다는 신호이자, 20년 묵은 IP의 감성을 사실상 처음으로 검증한 사례라는 점에서 향후 헐리우드의 속편 전략에 적지 않은 영향을 줄 전망입니다.