The Devil Wears Prada 2′ earns $43M in its second weekend to stay No. 1 at the box office, while ‘Mortal Kombat II’ opens to $40M — and this summer’s box office is already up 88% year over year.
Nobody beats Miranda Priestly. Not dragons, not video game warriors, not the entire summer movie season knocking on the door all at once.
Disney’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 held the No. 1 spot on domestic box office charts for a second consecutive weekend, pulling in another $43 million from 4,200 North American theaters — a decline of only 44% from its opening frame. Normally, studios throw a party if a sequel drops less than 50%. Here, Disney is doing something more complicated: watching a film that wasn’t supposed to be a juggernaut quietly become one.
Two weekends. $144.8 million domestically. $288.4 million internationally. A global total of $433 million.
For reference: the original 2006 film — the one that made Meryl Streep an icon and launched a thousand office humor memes — earned $326 million over its entire theatrical run. Not adjusted for inflation. The sequel has already blown past that in fourteen days.
Three major films opened against it this weekend and none managed to knock it off the throne.
Mortal Kombat II, Warner Bros.’ martial arts video game adaptation, landed in second place with a $40 million domestic debut from 3,503 theaters. On paper, that’s a decent opening for an R-rated genre film. In the context of what Warner Bros. needed — what they were clearly hoping for — it reads as a qualified disappointment. Produced for $80 million, it expanded on the $55 million budget of its predecessor, the original 2021 Mortal Kombat that launched simultaneously on HBO Max during the studio’s chaotic year-long experiment known internally as Project Popcorn. That film made just $23 million theatrically, though it wasn’t really a fair fight: a pandemic, a streaming debut on day one, and an audience still terrified of enclosed spaces. It reportedly became one of HBO Max’s most-streamed films, which is why a sequel was greenlit. Whether the appetite for a theatrical Mortal Kombat actually exists is a question the $40 million opening doesn’t definitively answer.
The film holds a 65% on Rotten Tomatoes and a “B” CinemaScore — not bad, but not franchise-launching either. A third film is already in development at Warner Bros., which either signals confidence or sunk-cost stubbornness, depending on who you ask.
Meanwhile, Lionsgate’s Michael — the Michael Jackson biopic — just keeps going. Its third weekend produced $36.5 million from 3,550 theaters, a remarkable 33% decline that puts the film in rarified territory. It has now earned $240.4 million domestically, surpassing Bohemian Rhapsody’s $216 million North American haul to become the highest-grossing musical biopic ever in the domestic market. Globally, the film sits at $577 million, chasing Bohemian Rhapsody’s $911 million worldwide total. At this trajectory, it could get there.
The weekend’s quiet surprise was Sheep Detective, Amazon MGM’s live-action/CGI family film about a flock of sheep who go full detective after their shepherd disappears. Hugh Jackman stars. It opened to $15.9 million from 3,574 locations — above expectations — earning a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and an “A-” CinemaScore. The $75 million production cost is steep for an original family IP with no built-in franchise base, but analysts are bullish. “With no big family entertainment on the calendar until ‘Toy Story 5’ on June 19, the film has room to run,” noted box office analyst David A. Gross of FranchiseRe. “And word-of-mouth should help.” Globally, it opened to $28 million.
Paramount’s Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), co-directed by James Cameron and the 24-year-old Grammy and Oscar winner herself, opened to $7.5 million from 2,613 venues domestically — slightly below projections, but stronger internationally at $12.6 million for a $20 million global start. It cost $20 million to produce. “The Billie Eilish/James Cameron concert collab shows the importance of great sound systems and visually impactful 3D in movie theaters,” said analyst Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore.
The bigger story is what this weekend — all of it — represents for an industry that desperately needed a good news cycle. The overall box office this Mother’s Day frame tracked an extraordinary 88% above the same weekend last year, when Marvel’s Thunderbolts, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, and A Minecraft Movie were leading the charts. Year-to-date, the domestic box office is running 16% ahead of 2025, per Comscore. Universal’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, now in its sixth weekend, added $6.6 million. Amazon’s Project Hail Mary, which has been astonishing studio economists all spring, earned $6 million in its eighth week of release.
The math is simple and, for once, it’s working in Hollywood’s favor: when the movies are good, people go.
