Disney is opening The Devil Wears Prada 2 in 4,100 North American theaters on Friday, May 1, with a weekend tracking range of $85–100 million domestic and $175–190 million global, four days before the Met Gala's Monday red carpet, in the same week the Costume Institute opens its expanded fashion galleries under the theme Costume Art. [1] The collision is not coincidental. The collision is the marketing plan. The sequel twenty years after the original, with Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci all returning, is — on the box-office record Variety and Deadline have been tracking since the trailer dropped in February — a credible $200-million-plus global earner in a calendar window that has produced exactly two such earners in the last six years. [2] [1]

The Met Gala is on Monday, May 4, at six p.m. Eastern. The benefit's co-chairs this year are Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour; the host committee runs to fifteen names including Yves Saint Laurent's Anthony Vaccarello, Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, and A'ja Wilson. [3] The dress code is Fashion Is Art. The exhibition the gala opens — Costume Institute's 2026 spring show — runs through October at expanded gallery space the Costume Institute spent the last two years building out. The expansion is the institute's first significant footprint move since 2014 and is, in the museum's official framing, a repositioning of fashion-curation from one-night benefit into year-round programming. [4]

For the studio releasing a fashion-industry comedy on the same calendar weekend, the alignment is what marketing departments call free media. The Friday-Saturday-Sunday rotation of audiences — fashion-conscious women of an age that saw the 2006 original in theaters, plus the cohort that found it on streaming — is, in Disney's media plan, the Met Gala's pre-show audience. The Monday red-carpet broadcast on Vogue's livestream and the same evening's after-party coverage on TikTok and Instagram are, in the studio's working assumption, the second-weekend trailer.

The studio's distribution chief, who declined to be named in this piece, told an industry presentation last week that the calendar choice "was the easiest decision the marketing room has made in three years," according to a person in attendance. [5] Disney's research apparently showed that the audience that planned to watch Met Gala coverage indexed at 3.4 times the general-audience rate for "intent to see Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters in opening weekend." The framing, in other words, is that a single weekend's fashion-calendar density absorbs the marketing function a $40-million pre-launch ad spend would otherwise have to do.

Whether the box office holds depends on Saturday and Sunday more than on Friday. Variety's Friday early read, posted at three p.m. Eastern based on Thursday-night previews and afternoon ticket-sale velocity, put the weekend at the high end of the tracking band — $98–102 million domestic — and at $182 million global with the international rollout in 71 territories. [6] Deadline's parallel read came in slightly lower at $93 million domestic but with a strong international skew, particularly in Italy, France, and the U.K., where the original's cultural footprint runs deepest. [2] Box Office Pro's senior analyst put the over/under at $95 million by close of business Friday and the global at $185 million; the analyst noted that the $238 million Lionsgate has booked with Michael, the spring's other estate-and-IP-driven release, sets a fiscal-year context for the studio's claim that fashion IP is now reliably bookable on the same scale. [7]

The IP-balance-sheet question — which the paper has been tracking since the Apr 28 Lionsgate Michael frame — has a different shape for Disney than it does for Lionsgate. Disney is not negotiating with an estate; the original's screenplay, by Aline Brosh McKenna, and the underlying novel, by Lauren Weisberger, are both straightforwardly licensable. The estate-equity question that dominates the Michael spreadsheet is absent here. What is present is the fashion-industry IP question — costume design by Marlene Stewart, the runway sequences shot at the Sant'Eustachio location built specifically for the production, and the brand placements that the original made into a generation's mood board. The sequel reportedly contains seventeen named brand placements, three of them tied to advertising deals tied directly to the Costume Institute exhibition. [8] The reported figures are not yet confirmed by Disney's marketing department.

Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci have done the press tour in coordinated fashion-week-style appearances. Streep's Anna Wintour-coded Miranda Priestly is, in the trailer set the studio has released, more sympathetic than the 2006 character — a softening that early reviewers, including the Hollywood Reporter and the New York Times, have read as a generational re-positioning rather than a softening of the satire. [9] Hathaway's Andy Sachs is now a magazine editor herself; the comedy's structural conflict reverses the original's, with Streep's Priestly as the print-magazine matriarch facing Hathaway's digital-publishing protégée. The trailer plays the conflict as a torch-passing gag. The reviews so far split on whether the gag is the joke or the resolution. [9] [10]

David Frankel, who directed the 2006 original, returned for the sequel. Aline Brosh McKenna wrote the screenplay. The production reportedly closed at $58 million, which puts the breakeven on the global tracking comfortably under the opening weekend. Disney's investor day in November will book the picture inside the 20th Century slate, which has had — by the studio's own slate-discipline language since the Iger restructuring — a difficult two-year stretch. [10] A $200-million-plus global gross on a $58-million budget would be the slate's strongest single-picture result of fiscal 2026 to date.

Whether the picture works as a picture is a question the reviews this weekend will answer. Whether the picture works as a calendar collision is a question the box office on Monday morning will answer, in the column Disney books inside the same fiscal weekend its lead actresses appear at the Met Gala steps in dresses the Costume Institute will likely add to the permanent collection. The studio is betting the second answer is the first one.

Five-thirty Friday afternoon Eastern, Disney's distribution office had already declared the Friday-night previews at $14.2 million, the studio's strongest May Friday-night since 2024. [6] The fashion calendar is doing the work the studio paid it to do.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles