Something very telling about the fact that you can now watch one of the most successful movies of 2026 in your living room on a Tuesday night, in between a rerun comfort show and whatever the algorithm suggests next. The movie made nearly $686 million worldwide on a budget of $100 million. Disney+ and Hulu will have The Devil Wears Prada 2 on July 29, less than three months after the movie’s $233 million opening weekend around the world. That kind of change is now pretty normal in Hollywood. It most likely shouldn’t be.
A lot of people who work in the movie business were surprised by how well the movie did at the box office. It was reasonable to be skeptical when Disney announced a follow-up to a 2006 comedy—a mid-budget fashion story aimed at adults that didn’t involve superheroes, an expanded universe, or a clear fashion show. The first one became a cult classic mostly through reruns on cable and repeated viewings on the weekends. This is the kind of slow cultural burn that’s harder to create these days. It didn’t just do well when The Devil Wears Prada 2 made $77 million in its first weekend in the United States. It had a point.
It wasn’t a new idea that made the movie work. David Frankel, who directed the first movie, didn’t try to make the idea more modern when it was never meant to be that way. In the sequel, Miranda Priestly has to deal with a media industry that is slowly falling apart. Andy Sachs comes back to Runway as a features editor after her newspaper shut down the whole department. The idea of journalists losing their jobs, print dying, and institutions scrambling is almost too real, and Anne Hathaway said as much when she called the movie “a love letter to journalists.” It looks like that sincerity worked, no matter how weak it sounds in a press quote.
The review score on Rotten Tomatoes was 77%. With an A- CinemaScore that suggested word of mouth would carry it forward, the audience went up to 84% in some counts. Yes, it did. Before it closed all of its theaters, the movie made over $676 million, which brought the total gross of the franchise over $1 billion. For a comedy follow-up about a fashion magazine, that’s major.
Still, here it is. Listening to. It’s on the same platforms where people watch things they forgot to watch or find something while they’re eating dinner. In one version of this story, that feels like a victory: more people can see movies, more people can afford to see them. That might be the right way to frame it. But there’s also a version that shows something uncomfortable: that the industry has quietly decided that even its real theatrical hits are just endings waiting to happen.
When the DVD comes out on July 28, it comes with extras like behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot in Italy, a look at how the costumes changed over time, and a music video for “Runway” by Lady Gaga and Doechii. That’s not nothing. That was put together by someone who cared. It does exist, though, in a world where fewer people buy physical media than did even five years ago. The streaming date the next day is what most people will remember.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 probably showed this year more than any other movie that adult comedies with real stars and real budgets can still bring people to the theaters as long as the content is appropriate for them. That’s a lesson Hollywood keeps forgetting and then having to pay a lot of money to learn again. The interesting question is whether it will work this time or whether the movie will just be added to Disney+’s library and seen as proof that streaming was always the plan. It seems like the business world already knows the answer. It’s just not sure if it wants to say it out loud yet.
