‘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