‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ broke the box office. It may also be the last great victory for Hollywood’s IP machine |
‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ broke the box office. It may also be the last great victory for Hollywood’s IP machine
Twenty years after Miranda Priestly first demanded her coat, Hollywood got its answer: millennials will show up. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened to $77 million domestically and $234 million worldwide in its first weekend—the third-best domestic debut of 2026, the biggest opening of Meryl Streep’s career, and the highest opening for a traditional comedy since Pitch Perfect 2 in 2015. It opened nearly $3 million higher than Marvel’s Thunderbolts. By the end of the month, it will likely have surpassed the entire $326 million theatrical run of the original.
It is, by every measure available, a triumph for the strategy that has come to define modern Hollywood: take a beloved piece of intellectual property, wait for the audience that grew up with it to become parents with disposable income, and put the original cast back on a soundstage. The strategy has a name in the industry now—IP maximization—and Prada 2 is its highest expression.
It may also be its high-water mark.
Look beyond the opening weekend numbers and a more troubling picture emerges, one that suggests Hollywood is not so much riding a nostalgia wave as scraping the bottom of a barrel it has been mining for 15 years. The conditions that made Prada 2 work—a culturally saturated original, intact talent, an audience aging into peak spending years, a thematic premise that maps onto how that audience now actually feels—are vanishingly rare. And the structural pressures pushing studios deeper into the IP playbook, from the $110 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger to the rise of AI-generated content, are about to make the formula even harder to execute. Prada 2 didn’t just succeed. It illuminated, in the brightness of its own success, just how narrow the path forward really is.
How IP came to eat the movies
To understand why Prada 2 feels like the end of something, it helps to remember how the beginning looked. The IP-maximization era is usually dated to 2008, when Marvel Studios released Iron Man and proved that a single comic-book character could be the foundation for a multi-decade, multi-film, multi-platform business. By the middle of the next decade, the lesson had been absorbed across the industry: original films were increasingly seen as risk; preexisting brands were treated as a hedge against it.
The math has only gotten more extreme. In 2025, nine of the top ten highest-grossing films were sequels, remakes or franchise installments. In 2024, not a single original film cracked the domestic top ten.
The 2026 release calendar is a monument to that logic. Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Toy Story, Super Mario Bros., Hunger Games, Scream, Scary Movie, Minions, Dune, Jumanji, Mortal Kombat 2, Insidious, a live-action Moana, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day—the ninth live-action Spider-Man film since 2002—are all on the slate alongside Prada 2, Happy Gilmore 2, Freakier Friday, a new Cape Fear, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The capstone of the strategy arrived earlier this year, when Paramount Skydance, led by 43-year-old David Ellison, won a contested $110 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, beating out an $83 billion offer from Netflix. In the SEC filings announcing the deal, Paramount projected more than $6 billion in annual cost synergies. Ellison has pledged that the combined company will release at least 30 theatrical films a year and maintain a 45-day theatrical window. He has also said most of the $6 billion will come from “nonlabor sources.” Hollywood is bracing for layoffs anyway.
Fortune‘s Geoff Colvin, in his April/May cover........