The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened Thursday night to $10.2 million in previews across 3,750 theaters, a result that puts the Disney sequel on the high end of its $75-100 million domestic tracking range and confirms what the studio's marketing campaign has been engineering since the slot was confirmed in November: a Met Gala-weekend launch as a single piece of integrated promotional architecture. [1]

The paper argued Friday that the May 1 release date was the campaign — Met Gala Monday plus a Saturday matinee plus a Sunday brunch as the audience's three-day fashion rotation. The Thursday preview number is the campaign cashing the first check. $10.2 million on previews of a comedy sequel without a Marvel cape, a singing princess, or a known IP younger than 2006 is, by Disney's recent record, an outsized result; it is the studio's third-best preview night for a non-franchise release in the past decade, after Free Guy in 2021 and The Marvels in 2023. [1][2]

The four-quadrant theater split published Friday evening by Comscore showed the preview audience skewing 71 percent female, 53 percent over-30, and disproportionately concentrated in the top 30 markets — the New York-Los Angeles-Chicago-Boston-DC-San Francisco corridor accounted for 38 percent of preview revenue against 24 percent of the country's screens. [3] The geographic concentration is consistent with a Met-Gala-week marketing thesis: the audience that follows fashion press also lives where fashion press is produced. The wide expansion test runs Friday and Saturday in the bottom-150 markets.

The Met Gala connection is not accidental at the level of the film itself. Anna Wintour's 2026 theme — "Costume Art: Sculptural Beauty Across Centuries" — was announced in November on a calendar choreographed with Disney to land six months before the Prada 2 release. Wintour holds a producer credit on the film. Three of the film's costume looks, designed by Patricia Field returning from the original, were re-engineered by Tom Ford for Met Gala display Monday and will appear simultaneously in the Costume Institute exhibit and on screen at AMC Lincoln Square. [4] The film's Miranda Priestly tableau — Meryl Streep's character on the magazine cover — is, at the Met, a centerpiece of the sculptural-beauty installation. The audience that pays for the matinee and the visitor that pays for the museum see the same dress.

The trade response Friday was uniform. Variety's Rebecca Rubin called the previews "the strongest non-franchise preview number for a comedy sequel since Sex and the City 2 in 2010"; Deadline's Anthony D'Alessandro put the Friday-Sunday number at $32-38 million domestic, on the way to a $90-100 million weekend; Hollywood Reporter's Pamela McClintock noted that the Thursday previews ran in 75 percent of available theaters but only 18 percent of total screens, suggesting a slow expansion rather than an explosive opening. [5][6][7]

The calendar economics underneath are familiar. Disney spent roughly $90 million on prints and advertising plus a $130 million negative cost — the studio's mid-budget play between the $250 million Marvel ceiling and the $40 million live-action floor. [2] At a $90 million domestic opening and a $175-190 million global, the film breaks even on theatrical alone before the Disney+ window opens; everything past that is the franchise resurrection. The original 2006 Prada grossed $327 million worldwide on a $35 million budget and remains, in Disney's owned-IP catalog after the 2019 Fox acquisition, one of the most financially efficient comedies of the modern era.

What the Met-week launch documents is the studio's confidence that the audience's fashion attention is, this week, an addressable revenue line. The strategy was not available a decade ago — the Met Gala in 2016 was a fashion-press event with limited consumer-side awareness; in 2026 it is, after the rise of TikTok red-carpet livestream and the Vogue Met-week social roster, a four-day general-audience cultural event. Disney's marketing department effectively bought a Costume Institute integration the way the Pixar division buys real-estate at Disneyland: the theme park ticket and the movie ticket are the same thread. [4]

Saturday's matinee is the test. The audience is buying dresses they will see at the Met on Monday.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles