The Devil Wears Prada 2 took $10 million in Thursday previews, on 4,100 screens, with Disney/20th Century Studios releasing tracking that puts the opening weekend in the $75 to $80 million range domestic and $175 to $190 million global. [1] The trades printed those numbers Friday afternoon. By Saturday the secondary number was the one the publicity team had been planning around for a year: Meryl Streep's name on no Met Gala invitation list and no public appearance schedule for Monday's event. [2]

The paper looked at the setup Saturday in Devil Wears Prada 2 runs ten million Thursday previews into Met Gala week. The execution is what Sunday brings. The Met Gala — first Monday of May, "Costume Art" theme, "Fashion is Art" dress code — is the New York City press event of the spring. Anna Wintour built the modern Gala, in part, on the years when Streep, in the original Devil Wears Prada, played the fictional editor whose entire authority rested on it. [3] The first Devil pulled the Wintour archetype into the multiplex; this Gala, the second Monday in May 2026, is when the second Devil takes the marketplace ground the first one charted.

Streep's choice to be absent is not a snub. It is the sale. The Met Gala is, in 2026, both a press event and a sponsorship event, with the boycott storyline around Bezos and Sánchez as honorary chairs running into a third week of complication. [4] By staying away, Streep does three things at once. She avoids the political crossfire — neither attendee nor refusenik. She prints the entire Devil cycle as the Streep alternative to the Wintour ritual she helped immortalize. And she gives the trades a counter-narrative for Monday morning that does not require her to do a single press hit. The film opens Friday. The publicity calendar is already full because of what is not on it.

The numbers are the floor. The $10 million Thursday is one of the ten largest May previews of the streaming era. The 4,100-theater count is wider than Avatar 3 opened on. The opening-weekend tracking, at the high end of the $75-80 million range, would put the film at the top of the May calendar through Memorial Day weekend, with Mission: Impossible 7 a hard ceiling. The international print at $175-190 million reflects the unusually warm reception of Anne Hathaway's run-up press cycle in London and Tokyo, where the original film maintained generational chart performance through 2024. [5]

The cast composition is the second commercial story. Streep, Hathaway, and Emily Blunt return; Stanley Tucci returns; Patrick Brammall, Pauline Chalamet, and Tracie Thoms join. Aline Brosh McKenna wrote. David Frankel returns to direct. Disney/20C Studios financed the property at a budget reported at $90 million plus marketing spend in the $70-80 million range. [6] The math, at $80 million domestic Friday-to-Sunday, has the film clearing breakeven domestically by mid-second weekend. The international print clears the rest. The opener is paid for by the trailer and the cast's collective name recognition, not by influencer spend or social-media amplification, which the marketing team kept understated by sequel-tentpole standards.

The competing event Monday is the Pulitzer Prize ceremony at Columbia, which the paper covers separately as a press-freedom collision. The Pulitzer livestream, the Met Gala red carpet, and the Devil Wears Prada 2 second-day box office will run as parallel news events. The Streep narrative will unify them. Friday's box office report will run with photos from a multiplex, not a step-and-repeat. The strategy is sequential: print the previews, skip the Gala, take the second weekend on the runway the absence cleared.

What MSM has emphasized: the previews number. Variety, Deadline, and BoxOfficePro all carried the $10 million Thursday and the $75-80 million opening tracking. [1][6][7] The cast call sheet was the second beat. The Streep absence, in the trades' Sunday filings, is at most a paragraph. What X has emphasized: the absence as the campaign. Film Twitter took 24 hours to put the Friday previews number and the Met Gala no-show together as one narrative. The thread the discourse settled on: Streep is the only A-list talent in 2026 who can afford to be subtractive about a New York press event in the same week she opens a movie.

There is a generational read in this. The press strategy assumes audiences will reward — and the trades will report on — withheld appearances as a positioning instrument. That assumption was untestable five years ago. It has been testable since the post-Strike publicity contraction of 2024. The Devil 2 campaign is the cleanest A-list use of the instrument since George Clooney's Cannes-only press tour for Wolfs in 2024. The instrument requires a star whose box-office gravity is independent of red-carpet repetition. Streep has that gravity. Hathaway, by carrying the trades-circuit promotion, has cleared the press demand. Blunt has the social-engagement floor. Streep gets to opt out.

The cultural register is that the Met Gala, as a brand event, has lost the ability to require the talent it created. That is the second story line, and it cuts against the Gala. The Wintour-Bezos-Sánchez tableau on Monday will be the shot the boycott press wanted. The Streep absence will be the shot that everyone else in the room knows about and no one says. The Gala is going to print Sánchez carrying Vogue's largest single sponsorship in 12 years; the Devil 2 box office is going to print Streep carrying a film without attending the Gala. Two events, one media week, two different reads on the same New York press circuit.

By Monday night, the previews number will be a full Friday-to-Sunday. By Tuesday, the second weekend of holds will be the question. By the second week, Streep's absence will be a footnote. The opening weekend is the campaign's payoff. The Gala is the ticker tape.

Bring the wedge heels. Run, don't walk.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles