Disney's "The Devil Wears Prada 2" finished its opening weekend at $77 million domestic, $156.6 million international, and $233-234 million worldwide — the second-biggest worldwide opening of 2026 behind only "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" at $372.5 million. [1] It is the biggest domestic opening for a traditional comedy since 2015's "Pitch Perfect 2." [2] On the Monday night of opening weekend, Meryl Streep — the actor whose 2006 performance redefined Anna Wintour as a fictional character — was, for the first time in years, absent from the actual Anna Wintour event. The same-day brand parable is the second story.

The paper's Monday account of the opening weekend numbers named the figure and the absence in the same headline. Tuesday's reading is what each of those facts says about the other. The paper also tracked, separately, the unusual symmetry of a fictional Wintour-figure on screen while the actual Wintour was hosting her first Met Gala in her new Condé Nast chief-content-officer role. Streep's publicist declined to give a reason for the no-show. Anna Wintour did not name Streep among the absences when reporters asked her at the Costume Institute press preview Monday morning.

The numbers themselves were a surprise to almost no one inside the industry. Variety's pre-release tracking projected $80 million domestic. Box-office accounts including DiscussingFilm and Box Office Forecast called the opening "second biggest of 2026" and floated $750 million as a global ceiling on a $100 million production budget. The international over-index — $156.6 million on a $77 million domestic base — confirms that Disney's globalization machinery on its established IP catalog is, post-streaming-pivot, functioning. Variety's post-weekend account read: movie theaters are "en vogue again — at least based on the blockbuster turnout for The Devil Wears Prada 2." [1]

The structural significance of the number is what it says about millennial-mid-budget feasibility. The original "Devil Wears Prada" opened in 2006 to $27 million on a $35 million budget. Adjusted, that's roughly $42 million in 2026 dollars on a $54 million budget. The sequel, on a budget that has roughly doubled in real terms ($100 million vs $54 million inflation-adjusted), opened to nearly four times the original's first-weekend take. The math is the answer to the question Hollywood has been asking for two years: can a non-IP-driven, mid-budget, adult-skewing comedy still open above $50 million domestic? The empirical answer this weekend was yes — but only when "non-IP-driven" is leveraged against twenty years of nostalgia equity in the original property.

Disney's marketing did not hide this. The trailer became, per Global Box Office's accounting, the most-watched trailer of the year — 181.5 million views in its first 24 hours — partly because it leaned hard into the recognizability of Stanley Tucci's Nigel, Anne Hathaway's Andy, Emily Blunt's Emily, and Streep's Miranda. [3] The film is not about new characters. It is about old characters twenty years on. The marketing knew it. The audience knew it. The box office confirmed both.

The Met Gala absence sits uneasily next to the box office. Streep has attended the Met Gala consistently for more than a decade; she chaired the 2018 "Heavenly Bodies" gala. Her decline this year landed in the same news cycle as the Bezos-co-chair register — the plural absence of Streep, Bella Hadid, and Zendaya, with Hadid's withdrawal explicitly attributed by trade press to Lauren Sánchez Bezos's honorary chair role. Streep's publicist demurred on the cause. The publicist's silence is a form of position.

Disney did not stage the symmetry. The film's release date was set in early 2025; the Met Gala's first-Monday-in-May calendar is fixed; Streep's RSVP was Streep's. But the symmetry happened. The actor whose 2006 performance permanently reshaped public perception of Anna Wintour skipped the actual Anna Wintour event for the first time in years on the same weekend her sequel grossed a quarter-billion dollars while reshaping it again. The trade press has spent forty-eight hours producing variations on the observation; pop-culture accounts on X have produced more.

The second-order consequence for Disney is straightforward. The studio has another Streep-as-Miranda film in the franchise on its 2027 development slate; the opening weekend's performance secures it. The second-order consequence for Anna Wintour is more delicate. Wintour's Met Gala raised $42 million on $100,000 tickets and $350,000 tables, with Bezos paying up to $20 million to host. [4] The night was, by the financial measure that organizes it, a record. It was also, by the absence-register, a compromised record — not Streep's compromise, exactly, but a compromise the night absorbed. The evening's most identifiable absence was the actor identified, for two decades, with the night's host.

What the box office does not change is the underlying argument the absence makes. Streep skipped. The film opened. Both facts are now in the public record, side by side, on the same weekend, and they describe — across two distinct New York rooms — a single cultural moment in which the fictional version of an event grossed more than the actual event raised. That is not a normal weekend. It is the weekend that happened.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles