By the Numbers: How Miranda Priestly Out-Demoed Mortal Kombat II and a Michael Jackson Biopic in the Same Weekend

4 months ago by Jordan Blake 3 min read

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Three films cleared $36 million domestically the weekend of May 8-10, and the 20-year-old comedy sequel beat them both. The −44% drop is doing all the work — and the demographic data shows exactly why none of the new entrants laid a glove on Miranda Priestly.

Three films cleared $36 million domestically the weekend of May 8–10. Only one of them was in its second weekend, fending off both an action tentpole's debut and the third weekend of the year's biggest music biopic — and it did it with a drop rate that legacy comedy sequels almost never post. Let me show you what the demographic data actually reveals.

The Leaderboard: A Three-Film Photo Finish

The top of the chart looked like a focus-group experiment that escaped into the wild:

| # | Title | Weekend | Theaters | Status | |---|-------|---------|----------|--------| | 1 | The Devil Wears Prada 2 | $43.0M | 4,200 | W2, −44% | | 2 | Mortal Kombat II | $40.0M | 3,503 | Opening | | 3 | Michael | $36.5M | 3,550 | W3 |

That is a $6.5 million gap from #1 to #3. For context, on a normal weekend the #1 and #3 films are usually separated by something closer to twenty million dollars. The top three this weekend essentially tied — except they were not playing the same game. One was a comedy sequel skewing female and over-25. One was a hard-R fighting-game adaptation skewing male and under-35. One was a music biopic skewing female and Black and older. Three completely different audiences, three theaters down the hall from each other.

The Number That Actually Won the Weekend: −44%

Miranda Priestly's $43.0M is the headline. The real story is the −44% that sits next to it.

Female-led legacy comedy sequels do not hold like that. Here is the comp set:

| Film | Opening | W2 | Drop | |------|---------|----|----| | Sex and the City 2 (2010) | $31.0M | $12.3M | −60% | | Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018) | $35.0M | $15.1M | −57% | | The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) | $77.0M | $43.0M | −44% |

That −44% is not just better than the genre average — it is 13 to 16 percentage points better than the two most direct comps in the modern era. And it happened in a weekend where the film absorbed not one but two major new entrants: a wide-release action sequel and the third weekend of a Top-5 grosser of the year. A normal female-skew comedy sequel would have been pancaked into something like $30M with a −61% drop. This one held within 44%.

A small note on cumes: through ten days, The Devil Wears Prada 2 sits at $144.8M domestic and $433M worldwide. The 2006 original took roughly twice as long to reach those numbers domestically. Twenty years of accumulated audience patience, paid in one weekend.

The Demographic Defense, Side-by-Side

Why didn't Mortal Kombat II or Michael take Miranda's audience? Because Miranda's audience and their audiences barely overlap.

Here is the PostTrak/CinemaScore picture as of opening for each film:

| Film | Female% | 25+% | CinemaScore | |------|---------|------|-------------| | The Devil Wears Prada 2 | 75% | 85%* | B (PostTrak 76% definite recommend) | | Mortal Kombat II | 25% | <50% | B | | Michael | 61% | 66% | A− |

*DWP2 opening composition: 63% women 25+, 22% men 25+, 12% women under 25, 2% men under 25.

Now stack that against the obvious question — who did Mortal Kombat II actually pull from? 75% male is the answer Warner Bros. would have circled in red on the marketing deck. That is a near-perfect inverse of Prada's 75% female. The fighting-game crowd does not show up at the multiplex on Mother's Day weekend to watch Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep argue about magazine layouts. Counterprogramming worked exactly the way the calendar said it would.

Michael is the more interesting threat on paper because it skews female too (61%) and older (66% over 25). But the overlap with Prada's audience leaks elsewhere: Black moviegoers made up 38% of Michael's opening audience, more than any other ethnic group, and the film's strongest pull is the "I'm here because I love Michael Jackson" half of the room — PostTrak clocked that at 50% of Michael's opening audience saying they came for the subject matter. The Venn diagram between "Meryl Streep return after 20 years" and "Jaafar Jackson channeling his uncle in IMAX" is real, but the slice is small.

What MK2's Audience Math Actually Says

Mortal Kombat II's $40.0M is not a disaster — it is the #7 domestic opening of 2026 so far. But the comp it really wants is its own predecessor's $42.2M April 2021 debut, which it failed to match in raw dollars and underperformed against in real terms when you adjust for the five years of inflation. Warner Bros. spent $122M on this one (per the production budget filings) versus $55M on the 2021 film. The math gets uncomfortable fast: a $40M opening on a $122M production needs a strong international run to make sense, and the $23M overseas figure is not it.

For the demographic-defense story, here is what matters: MK2 was always going to play to a 25–34 male core. Prada 2 was never going to play to that core. Two films, same weekend, almost zero audience competition — that is the textbook definition of "the calendar did its job."

What Michael Actually Took (and Didn't)

Michael's −32% hold in week 3 (from $54M in W2 to $36.5M in W3) is one of the cleanest biopic holds on record — better than Bohemian Rhapsody's W3, and nowhere near the 50%+ collapse a normal music biopic posts once the opening fan rush burns off. By the end of W3 the film had crossed $577M worldwide, putting it inside striking distance of $600M global and the fourth-highest grosser of 2026 through May.

The audience it kept is the audience Prada 2 never had: heavily Black, heavily MJ-fan-motivated, family-coded. Lionsgate's PostTrak even showed 36% families on Thursday opening and 31% couples on Friday — not the demographic that calls a sitter to go see Anne Hathaway monologue about a print magazine in 2026.

This is the part the demographic-defense thesis hinges on: Michael took the older-female-leaning audience that would have eroded Prada 2's second weekend if both films were chasing the same room. Instead, Michael was busy converting its own audience pool — Black moviegoers, MJ-tribute attendees, families. Prada 2 kept its 25+ professional-woman cohort largely intact.

The Verdict, By the Numbers

Three films cleared $36M. None of them stole meaningfully from each other. The result is a weekend where the holdover beat both new entrants — not because the new entrants underperformed (they didn't; MK2 hit projections, Michael held its biopic curve) but because The Devil Wears Prada 2's audience was structurally protected by who Mortal Kombat II and Michael were each built to reach.

When a female-led legacy comedy sequel drops only 44% in its second weekend — against a 60%-and-57% historical comp range — that is not luck. That is a calendar working exactly as designed and an audience that showed up twice. The 2006 original hit $124.7M domestic across its entire theatrical run. The 2026 sequel passed that number in ten days.

Twenty years of brand patience. One weekend to prove it was worth the wait.

Numbers via Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and Box Office Mojo, May 8–10, 2026.