Nostalgia is paying off for Hollywood.
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” opened to an estimated $233.6 million worldwide this weekend, driven largely by women eager to rejoin Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in the world of fashion journalism 20 years after the original movie. It grossed $77 million in the U.S. and Canada and an additional $156.6 million internationally.
The film from Disney’s 20th Century Studios is the latest in a string of box office hits powered by pop-culture nostalgia among millennial and Gen X audiences, after the Michael Jackson biopic “Michael” and “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” did huge business.
At a time when real-world events seem overwhelming and economic anxiety is high, it seems audiences want to sink into movies that feel like a favorite pair of slippers. The trend is a much-needed boost for Hollywood as franchises like Marvel and Fast & Furious are struggling and theatrical attendance is down significantly from prepandemic levels.
“Nostalgia is a critical driver for people right now in how they consume entertainment,” said Martha Morrison, head of marketing for Disney Entertainment Studios. “On ‘Prada,’ it is, certainly.”
The recent CinemaCon industry event, where studios showed off their coming releases to theater operators, was packed full of aging stars promoting sequels to films from the 1980s, ‘90s and 2000s, including “Toy Story 5,” “Practical Magic 2,” “Focker-in-Law,” “Scary Movie 6” and “Spaceballs: The New One.”
“When we did ‘Ice Age’ one, I know I wasn’t wearing compression socks,” actor Ray Romano quipped while hyping next year’s “Ice Age: Boiling Point,” the sixth theatrical film in the animated franchise that started in 2002.
Studios also promoted adaptations of the 30-year-old videogame series “Resident Evil” and the 1980s toy line and cartoon “Masters of the Universe,” as well as a film about the making of “Rocky.”
Perhaps the strongest sign that “The Devil Wears Prada” has remained salient in pop culture for two decades is how many of its lines of dialogue have become social-media memes, including actor Stanley Tucci’s “gird your loins.”
For the sequel, Disney marketers relied heavily on details from the 2006 original that have burrowed their way into the zeitgeist. The trailer translated one of Streep’s best-known “Prada” zingers—“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking”—into the tagline: “A sequel? For spring? Groundbreaking.”
The first “Devil Wears Prada,” which grossed a total of $326.6 million worldwide, was released by Twentieth Century Fox. When Disney bought most of Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019, the comedy wasn’t emphasized as a potentially valuable franchise alongside Avatar and Planet of the Apes.
But soon after the “Prada” sequel was shot last summer, Disney identified it as one of the company’s most commercially promising releases of 2026 and went all out on advertising, including brand partnerships with companies like Dior and Starbucks.
The marketing campaign “is definitely at the top echelon of what we do,” said Morrison. “It’s akin to some of our biggest blockbusters.”
Write to Ben Fritz at ben.fritz@wsj.com