Audiences refuse to stop seeing Michael ‘ til they get enough, as the biopic is set for a massive second weekend, even despite The Devil Wears Prada 2 being the second biggest opening of the year globally behind The Super Mario Galaxy.
We have yet another great opening weekend for a film, even if it undershot the projects a little bit domestically thanks in part to a frontloaded opening weekend.
The long-awaited follow-up to the 2006 cult classic The Devil Wears Prada brought back its original cast, added The Office’s BJ Novak and Academy Award nominee Kenneth Branagh, and while it remained a nostalgia-driven cashgrab, found ways to tell a new story in a modern context. This allowed them to manage an A- CinemaScore, the second highest of director David Frankel’s career, surpasing the first one. It’s one of the stronger CinemaScore’s historically for a direct comedy sequel. This unfortunately couldn’t propel it above projections, but opening domestically at over $77M as a comedy geared toward adults about fashion is a pretty strong number. It outperformed the domestic opening weekend of the tentpole that opened on this particular weekend the last two years, beating out Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, a franchise in which Meryl Streep isn’t exactly endearing herself with these days, and 2024’s The Fall Guy, also starring Emily Blunt, by over $50M. It did overperform globally, posting the second biggest opening weekend of 2026 to this point. It’s already within $100M of surpassing the total gross of the original, though this isn’t adjusted for inflation. The $234M opening puts it just $15M shy of profitability for the studio in just four days. One thing to consider is that not all worldwide openings are the same, and it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. For context, every film has different opening weekend strategies, and very few films open in every country at the same time outside of large tentpoles, giving films like this one an edge in those conversations. But this film was always going to be huge, considering it’s Meryl Streep’s first live-action theatrical performance this decade, as she hadn’t been seen on the big screen since Greta Gerwig’s Little Women in 2019. A majority of her projects, notably FX’s Only Murders in the Building, Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, and HBO’s Let Them All Talk, have been streaming focused. Between a return of sorts for one of Hollywood’s titans, and a follow-up to a beloved movie for under-represented demographics at the box office, this was always going to open massive.
No one wants to be defeated, but Michael is showing how funky and strong its fight is. The MJ biopic saw an excellent second weekend finishing runner-up at the domestic box office. The loss of certain PLF, though it did retain a majority of its IMAX screens, and the arrival of DWP2 which cut into the female audience demo a bit probably hurt it more than it would’ve otherwise made in its second weekend, but a sub-45% drop domestically with nearly $55M is tremendous for a movie that opened as strong as it did. The film has already made twice its budget, and should deliver a much-needed win for Lionsgate, despite the struggles in production that ballooned the movie made for the King of Pop.
The Super Mario Galaxy still pulled in $12M, despite the news about PVOD, dominating the family market. Another film that had a recent PVOD date, Amazon’s Project Hail Mary, came in fourth, and is still, in its seventh weekend, seeing drops of just over 30%. It has officially surpassed The Martian to become the highest-grossing Andy Weir adaptation, and is within $50M of surpassing Nolan’s Interstellar to become the highest grossing non-franchise space film in its original box office run. After box office disappointments through the years ranging from Bladerunner 2049 and the aforementioned Fall Guy (which I still suggest made significantly more with Gosling than they would have other actors, and just were never commercial enough projects to justify their budgets), Ryan Gosling’s movie stardom is officially solidified.
NEON’s Hokum, a supernatural horror starring Severance star Adam Scott, rounded out the top five with $6.4M. With its small budget, this is a very good start for what should be another horror success for the indie darling studio.
Number six is one of the biggest bombs of the year, Angel Studios Animal Farm. I know what you’re thinking: the fact that Angel Studios was behind an Orwell adaptation is more horrifying than any horror film. The film made just $3.4M, averaging the same amount per theatre on average as Lee Cronin’s The Mummy did in significantly fewer theatres in its third weekend. Andy Serkis’ animated family film has a loaded cast—Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, Gatten Matarazzo, among others—but won’t even look to make a dent in its $35M budget, and the film needs approx. $85M to breakeven. Perhaps the biggest problem for this film is that its distributor does not match its audience, as Angel Studios relies heavily on its loyal, cult-like audience to deliver low budget success stories. But with this attempt at a big budget film, they took a very liberal, anti-Russian novel and alienated their very conservative base. To make matters worse, they butchered the novel and alienated the exact audience they were trying to reach in an attempt to expand their reach. All the while, it’s an animation film catered to children, none of whom know anything Joseph Stalin’s totalitarianism or names of members of the cast. Let’s be real, which eight-year-old is watching Woody-era Cheers reruns or has any connection to the crazy lady from Fatal Attraction? Despite its relatively low-budget, this is another early contender for biggest bomb of 2026. A severe miscalculation, primarily because they had no idea who to market this toward.
But there had been another massive bomb: the eighth place movie, Deep Water, starring Ben Kingsley. The film was funded by Gene Simmons, yes, the KISS musician. Unfortunately, his film saw a “strutter” at the box office. His film made just $2.2M worldwide in its opening weekend despite its budget carrying a $40M pricetag. The film seems to have been dumped with low expectations and little marketing, so this can’t be overly stunning, but it’s worth noting that this will have a tough road, even on streaming, to reach profitability.
Among the rest of the top fifteen sits Lee Cronin’s The Mummy in seventh, That Time I Got Re-Incarnated as a Slime: Tears of the Azure Sea in ninth, Hoppers in 11th, One Spoon of Chocolate in 12th, You, Me and Tuscany in 13th, Mother Mary in 14th, and Over Your Dead Body in 15th. But worth noting: A24’s The Drama is still hanging around the top ten, coming in at number 10, even though it made just under $1M. The ability for a film with a premise that would turn off the average person sticking around the top ten for five straight weekends while being an A24 film is a testament to the budding starpower of Zendaya, who feels on the pricipice of truly breaking out as a household movie star this year with the final season of HBO’s Euphoria wrapping up her television commitments and Dune Part III, The Odyssey, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day all set to come out.
Looking ahead to Mother’s Day weekend: The Devil Wears Prada should see a sparse second weekend drop because it’s a film designed for mothers to go to alongside their daughters. The big release is excellent counterprogramming as the male demographic should show out well for Mortal Kombat II, which is receiving an IMAX release. The release that’s hard to guage, especially with such a range we’ve seen from current pop-star concert films between Beyonce and Taylor Swift, is the release of one of pops biggest young stars, Billie Eilish, who has a concert film releasing that had been directed by James Cameron, the visionary behind the Terminator and Avatar franchises.
Photo credit: 20th Century Studios.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer for Comicbook Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.