I have watched the original on some basic-cable rerun more times than I will admit in print, and it turns out I am not alone. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened on May 1 to 77 million dollars in North America, from 4,150 theaters, with an A-minus CinemaScore. That is nearly three times what the 2006 original made on its first weekend (27.5 million). Add 156.6 million overseas and the global debut was 233.6 million dollars, the biggest opening weekend of Meryl Streep's career, beating both Mamma Mia films.
Sit with the scale of that. A 20-year-old satire about a fashion magazine outgrossed almost every original film Hollywood released this year. By mid-June the sequel had cleared 676 million dollars worldwide, and once you fold in the original's 326 million lifetime, the two-film franchise sailed past a billion dollars combined, on a film the same report pegs at about 100 million to make and 80 million to market. That is a hit by any math.
So who actually showed up? Women were 76 percent of the opening-weekend crowd, and the tell is in the fine print: women under 25 were just 12 percent, men under 25 a rounding error at 2 percent. This was not a young crowd. It was millennials cashing in two decades of couch rewatches.
Comscore's Paul Dergarabedian told Fortune the win came down to the package, the original cast, director, and writer all back in the room: "to me, that's the most important thing." Brett Schneider, a marketing professor at UCLA, told the magazine what he read behind it: "There's a broader reaction happening to hyper-optimized digital culture." The reunion tour sold out because the whole band came back.
Here is the part I keep turning over. The film is about the very thing that made it possible dying. Andy Sachs comes back to Runway as its new features editor, and Miranda Priestly is fighting to keep her glossy print empire alive as advertising drains away and Emily, now a rival executive, circles the wreckage. A movie mourning the death of the magazine, sold to us with a 39.95-dollar branded popcorn bucket by the same machine strip-mining its own back catalog. Vox called it "capitalist art that hates capitalist art," a contradiction Fortune dwelt on too, and honestly, that lands. Andy losing her serious-journalism dream is the millennial broken-promise story, only this time it is wearing Prada.
Every studio saw the number. The 2000s-nostalgia wave was already rolling, Freakier Friday worked last year, Practical Magic 2 arrives in September, and Shrek 5, Jumanji, and a Grinch revival are all queued behind it. Prada 2 is the proof of concept they will all point to. But the number comes with a warning. The sweet spot is narrow: for every Freakier Friday there is a Zoolander 2 or an Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny that assumed the name alone was enough. Analyst Daria Ershova told Fortune the quiet part out loud, that leaning on nostalgia "bets against the thing that's actually working, which is original, event-worthy films that give people a reason to show up together."
The film lands on Disney+ and Hulu on July 29, which is where most of us will finally watch Miranda arch that eyebrow again. What Prada 2 proved is narrower than nostalgia sells. It is that nostalgia sells when you bring the whole band back and hand them something true to play, here the quiet grief of watching a thing you loved go out of print. Slap the name on a hollow retread and audiences smell it a mile off. That's all.
