2026 at the Multiplex: Project Hail Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and a Summer Box Office Recovering Its Confidence

With the domestic box office projected to clear $9 billion for 2026, a trio of significant overperformers — led by Amazon MGM's Ryan Gosling sci-fi epic — has stabilized the market heading into the most anticipated summer in years.

By Republic of Cinema · May 29, 2026

The box office story of 2026 so far is, at its core, a story about bets paying off. The industry entered the year with cautious optimism — 2025 had been defined by genuine blockbusters alongside genuine misfires, and the structural anxieties of streaming consolidation had not dissipated. What the first five months of 2026 have delivered, however, is something more encouraging: a succession of titles that have over-performed against tracking, drawn broad audiences, and demonstrated that theatrical cinema retains its gravitational pull when the material is right.

Film: Project Hail Mary (Amazon MGM)

Domestic Total (as of late May): $329.8 million

International Total: $328 million (83 markets)

Worldwide Total: ~$656 million

Opening Weekend (Domestic): $80.6 million

Budget (reported): $200 million

Director: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

The year's most instructive success story belongs to Project Hail Mary. Directed by the Spider-Verse duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and starring Ryan Gosling as science teacher Ryland Grace — a man who wakes alone on a spaceship with no memory, tasked with saving the solar system — the film opened on March 20 to a domestic debut of $80.6 million, the largest opening of 2026 at that point and the best in Amazon MGM Studios' history, surpassing Creed III's $58.3 million from 2023. Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore described the result as 'a key turning point for Amazon MGM, giving the distributor its first $100 million-plus domestic earner.'

The film's performance is notable beyond the raw numbers. Project Hail Mary — adapted from Andy Weir's novel by Drew Goddard — opened to an A CinemaScore and held with remarkable discipline in subsequent weekends, registering a 32% second-weekend drop at a time when most wide releases bleed far more aggressively. By its ninth weekend in the top ten, it had become the first film of 2026 to sustain that longevity. The worldwide total of approximately $656 million against a $200 million budget represents not just a financial success but an argument: that original, intellectually ambitious science fiction, when executed at the right level and marketed with precision, can compete with franchise product.

"Project Hail Mary held like a Nolan film. That discipline at the hold is what separates a hit from a classic box office run." — Trade analyst observation, Rotten Tomatoes

Film: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (20th Century Studios / Disney)

Opening Weekend (Domestic, est.): $73–80 million range

Second Weekend (Domestic): $43 million

Domestic Total (through mid-May): $145 million+

Notable International Markets: UK ($28.5M cume), Italy ($28.2M), Brazil ($22M)

The arrival of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Disney's decision to forgo a Marvel tentpole as the traditional Memorial Day weekend opener, represented a calculated gamble that has broadly paid off. The sequel, nearly two decades after the original's cultural impact, delivered the highest opening weekend year-to-date for a Hollywood title in multiple major territories — Italy posted its fourth-best opening ever for an MPA film behind Avengers: Endgame, Inside Out 2, and The Lion King (2019). The film's dominance in Europe and Latin America underscored a pattern that has defined the year: non-franchise legacy IP, when the creative product is credible, can command international audiences with an efficiency that manufactured sequels routinely cannot.

Elsewhere, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael opened globally to $218.8 million worldwide — the second-largest global opening of 2026 behind The Super Mario Galaxy Movie's $372.5 million — and has continued performing. The domestic summer landscape, with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey arriving July 17 and Avengers: Doomsday in December, suggests the year's $9 billion domestic forecast is not merely achievable but may be conservative. The industry has, for now, reasons to exhale.