The paper got Sunday wrong. The May 10 edition reported that Mortal Kombat II had edged Devil Wears Prada 2 in a Mother's Day photo finish. By Sunday evening's actuals, the call was inverted. Disney's Devil Wears Prada 2 took $43 million domestic in its second weekend, a 44% hold from its opening, and beat Warner Bros.' Mortal Kombat II opening of $40 million. Variety and Deadline ran the corrected numbers; Yahoo confirmed Disney crossed $2 billion year-to-date domestic over the weekend, the first studio to do so in 2026. [1][2][3]
The paper predicted Mortal Kombat II would take the weekend in yesterday's edition. The prediction was a read off Friday's preview number and Saturday's running, both of which favored the videogame adaptation. Mother's Day actuals do not always do what Friday previews suggest. Sunday's audience in the Devil Wears Prada 2 column was older, female, and arrived in groups — the per-screen behavior that lifts a hold above projection. The Mortal Kombat II audience was younger, male, and front-loaded into Friday and Saturday night.
That is the descriptive story. The structural story is what the gross means. Devil Wears Prada 2's domestic running is now $144.8 million; global is $433.2 million. The second weekend hold of -44% is the kind of curve that vindicates a $90 million production budget against a $250 million global break-even. Disney's $2 billion YTD milestone is a fact about market share more than about quality — it is the receipt the studio takes into a difficult quarter with regulatory pressure on its broadcast arm. Mortal Kombat II's $40 million domestic opening on a $23 million overseas split came in below tracking. The film grossed $63 million globally on a weekend the genre wanted bigger.
The Variety milestone piece walked through the studio math: Disney's lift is partly Captain America economics from earlier in the year, partly the Marvel sequel slate, partly the surprise duration of Prada's second weekend. The headline number is a year-to-date receipt the studio will use in the next ABC earnings discussion. The same studio sits inside Day 14 of the FCC's ABC license cliff, with a May 28 filing deadline narrowing each weekday. [2]
What X has been compressing is the cohort frame. The Prada audience is the cohort that was twenty-five when the first film opened in 2006. They are forty-five now. The film's machinery — the Anne Hathaway return, the Meryl Streep continuity, the Stanley Tucci character who has aged in real time — runs on cultural memory. Fortune's framing across the weekend, indexed widely, called this "the last great victory for Hollywood's IP machine." That is too neat. The IP machine has many such victories left. What this one demonstrates is that the cohort still answers when the machine calls — even when the call goes out at Mother's Day, on a holiday weekend that historically rewards horror or genre over legacy adult drama.
The Mortal Kombat franchise has the inverse problem. Its 2021 reboot opened at $42 million domestic on a $55 million production budget; the sequel was supposed to widen the audience past the gaming cohort. The opening number suggests it did not. Warner Bros. will get its money out of the international markets and the home-video lift. It will not get the genre-anchor result that would have justified the next sequel commission. Deadline's account treated the Mortal Kombat II opening as a structural disappointment inside an already-pressured Warner Bros. slate. [1]
The cohort-pressure-versus-tape-pressure split deepens. Disney's $2 billion YTD milestone is a tape-pressure win; the FCC license cliff is a regulatory pressure that runs against the same balance sheet. Warner Bros. is inside the Paramount foreign-ownership comment window opening this week; its parent's pending merger architecture absorbs both the Mortal Kombat II opening and the wider question of whether a 49.5%-foreign-owned media company is allowed to operate ABC's neighbor across town. The Mother's Day box office, in the paper's reading, is the receipt the regulatory week begins from.
The other lesson is editorial. Predictions of a Sunday box-office winner placed on Friday's previews carry the same risk as predictions of a Senate floor vote placed on a Monday Conference position. The actuals do not respect the projection. This paper made a call on Mother's Day, the call came back inverted, and the correction is the article — not the next week's Variety post-mortem. Disney won the weekend, Warner Bros. did not, the FCC clock continues to run, and the IP machine carries on.
-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles