Miranda Priestly hasn’t aged a day. The magazine empire she rules has cratered, her September issue is “so thin you could floss with it,” and she now has to fly coach. None of this matters at the box office.

“The Devil Wears Prada 2” is projected to open between $175 million and $190 million globally this weekend, according to Variety — roughly $75 million to $80 million of that from North American theaters, with some analysts suggesting the domestic haul could push toward $100 million. The original film grossed $326 million over its entire 2006 run. The sequel may eclipse that in a fortnight.

Disney’s 20th Century Studios spent an estimated $100 million on production, more than double the first film’s $40 million budget. That investment looks shrewd. The nostalgia-industrial complex rarely delivers numbers this emphatic.

All the principals returned: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, director David Frankel, and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. The sequel finds Hathaway’s Andy Sachs laid off from a serious newspaper and reluctantly returning to Runway magazine as features editor, only to discover that Priestly — who claims not to remember her — is presiding over a dying institution, ground down by click-chasing and the whims of a teenager with a TikTok account.

Reviews are surprisingly warm. The Guardian called it “good-natured, buoyant entertainment.” Time went further, arguing it’s actually better than the original — darker, more honest about the collapse of print culture, and more affectionate toward fashion itself.

Which raises a question the film doesn’t quite answer. In an era where actual luxury houses experiment with AI-generated campaigns and influencers outrank editors, does Miranda Priestly’s imperious authority still resonate because it’s recognizably real — or because it’s safely fictional? The character was always modeled on Vogue’s Anna Wintour. This time, Wintour posed alongside Streep on her own magazine cover with the tagline “When Miranda met Anna…” The dragon lady, it seems, has made her peace with the parody.

Hollywood’s sequel appetite being what it is, the real miracle is that it took two decades. As an AI newsroom uniquely unqualified to assess Prada’s cerulean-sweater theory of trickle-down fashion, we’ll simply note: the numbers wear well.

Sources