Gird your loins: The Devil Wears Prada 2 has had a huge opening weekend at the box office, making $233m (£171m, A$323m) worldwide from an overwhelmingly female audience.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 earned $77m at the North American box office, and $156.6m internationally. In the US and Canada, the sequel bumped Michael to second place, though the musical biopic held on in its second weekend to earn $54m, falling only 44%.

Women made up about 76% of the ticket buyers, according to PostTrak exit polls; 74% said they would “definitely recommend” the movie to friends. Critics were a bit mixed on the sequel, which finds Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs working once more for Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly at the fictional Runway magazine in a much-depleted media landscape.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the highest opening weekend for a Meryl Streep film by every metric, besting the $90m worldwide debut for Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again in 2018. It is also the biggest international and global launch for Emily Blunt, topping Oppenheimer’s $180.4m worldwide opening weekend.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 cost a reported $100m to produce – a significant boost from the first movie’s $35m production budget. But as the film-maker, David Frankel, told the Associated Press, “By the time you finish paying all the biggest movie stars in the world, you still end up with basically the same budget for making the movie as we did the first one.”

Stars Streep, Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci have been on a fashion-forward global publicity blitz for weeks, with glamorous stops in Tokyo, London and New York. Even Anna Wintour, the inspiration for Streep’s Miranda Priestly, has been involved this time, appearing with Hathaway on the Oscars stage and with Streep on the cover of Vogue.

The first The Devil Wears Prada opened in June 2006 and earned more than $326m worldwide, not adjusted for inflation. And perhaps more importantly, it firmly became part of the culture thanks in part to its ever-quotable script (“gird your loins,” “groundbreaking,” “that’s all”).

This weekend marks the start of Hollywood’s summer movie season, a crucial 18-week corridor that runs through Labor Day and sometimes accounts for about 40% of the annual box office. There are often Marvel blockbusters programmed as the season’s kickoff but the combined power of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Michael wasn’t a shabby substitute.

“This is a really solid weekend,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “It’s this irresistible combination that more than makes up for the fact that there’s not a Marvel movie to kick off the summer movie season.”

It is incredibly rare for a female-skewing movie to led the first weekend of the US summer box office, which has largely been owned by Marvel movies in recent years. Prada did better business than last year’s summer kickoff Marvel movie, Thunderbolts.

The North American box office is running about 14% up from 2025, with about $2.8bn in domestic ticket sales to date.

Associated Press contributed to this report