‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Scores Massive Box Office Debut — Just Behind 2026’s Biggest Hit

‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ has sashayed its way into the history books, landing a stunning $233.6M worldwide opening weekend and $77M domestically in a debut that has reshuffled just about every record Hollywood thought was safely locked away. The second biggest opening of 2026, behind the Super Mario Galaxy Movie

Nearly two decades after Miranda Priestly made the phrase “That’s all” a cultural institution, the sequel has proved that Runway magazine never really left the cultural conversation.

The opening marks the highest-ever debut weekend for Meryl Streep in any market, surpassing the $90M worldwide start of ‘Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again’, and the highest international and global opening for Emily Blunt, clearing the bar set by ‘Oppenheimer’, which launched to $176M worldwide.

The sheer scale of those records puts into sharp relief just how much the film’s audience had been waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Nielsen reported that streaming viewership for the original ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ surged 428% between March and April of this year, a number that speaks to a fandom that spent the lead-up to release rewatching every outfit change and withering glare.

The opening weekend alone has already earned the equivalent of 72% of the entire lifetime gross of the original film, which topped out at $326.5M globally. That puts the sequel on a trajectory that could see it lap its predecessor within weeks. The first ‘Devil Wears Prada’ opened to just $27.5M domestically back in 2006, positioned as counter-programming against ‘Superman Returns’. This time around, there was no comic-book competition required. The sequel is the main event, full stop.

Internationally, Italy led all overseas territories with $16.6M, an almost unheard-of occurrence for a Hollywood release, helped in no small part by the film’s Milan-set sequences featuring Lady Gaga.

In Italy, the sequel ranks as the fourth-highest opening ever for a Hollywood film. Gaga’s involvement traces back to a connection she made with Streep at ‘SNL 50’ last February. Director David Frankel asked Streep to make the call, and Gaga said yes on the spot despite being mid-way through her sold-out Mayhem World Tour. She ended up contributing far more than a cameo, with three original songs landing on the soundtrack.

The film earned an A- CinemaScore, a grade higher than the original’s B, with premium large formats driving roughly a third of the domestic weekend business. The teaser trailer generated 185M views in its first 24 hours when it dropped at the end of last year, becoming the most-viewed trailer in 20th Century Studios history, while the second trailer amassed 222M views in the same timeframe. The marketing machine behind the sequel was operating at a scale the franchise had never seen before.

Perhaps the most striking milestone is the cultural one. Never before has a female-skewing film opened the first weekend of summer, a slot that has historically belonged to Marvel spectacle. Vogue editor Anna Wintour, the widely acknowledged inspiration for Miranda Priestly, has fully embraced the sequel this time around, even posing alongside Streep on the cover of her own magazine. It is a full-circle moment that the original film, made under very different Hollywood assumptions about what kinds of movies could dominate, never quite got to have. Fashion, it turns out, is always in season.

Have something to add? Let us know in the comments.