Hollywood's May 2026 Slate and the Box Office Rebound
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a surprise top-five hit of 2026, joining a box office led by animation and franchises. A look at May's slate, the year's numbers, and how streaming is counter-programming the rebound.
Twenty years after a junior assistant fetched Miranda Priestly's coffee, The Devil Wears Prada 2 has quietly become one of the biggest films of 2026 — and it did it the old-fashioned way, by getting people back into theatres. As of late May 2026, the sequel has pulled in roughly $200 million domestically, slotting into the year's top five. It's the kind of result the exhibition business has been praying for: not a superhero, not a sequel to a sequel nobody asked for, but a grown-up comedy that turned nostalgia into ticket sales. May 2026's slate, taken together, is the clearest test yet of a question that's haunted Hollywood for half a decade — do people still leave the house for the movies?
The early answer, judging by the numbers, is a cautious yes. Here's what's driving May, what the year's box office actually says about the recovery, and how the streaming services are counter-programming the whole thing.
May's big swings
Disney loaded the month with two very different tentpoles, and a third studio bet rounded it out.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the surprise engine. It reunites the original cast two decades on, with Meryl Streep back as the imperious Miranda Priestly and Anne Hathaway returning as Andy Sachs — now successful in her own right and pulled back into Miranda's orbit. The setup is sharp: Runway magazine, and the legacy-media empire it represents, must survive a fashion and publishing world that has been turned upside down since the first film. That premise — old guard versus a disrupted industry — is doing real work, and the box office suggests audiences showed up for both the nostalgia and the update.
The Mandalorian & Grogu is the inverse bet: a known-quantity franchise making the jump from streaming to the big screen. Set after the fall of the Empire, with Imperial warlords still threatening a galaxy the New Republic is trying to stabilize, it sends bounty hunter Din Djarin and his apprentice Grogu back into action. For Disney, it's a test of whether a beloved streaming series can become a theatrical draw — a question the entire industry is watching, because the streaming-to-cinema pipeline is one of the few genuinely new playbooks left.
Mortal Kombat II is the wildcard. The follow-up to the 2021 video-game reboot — which opened to $23.3 million — was moved up from an October 2025 slot to May 2026 on the back of strong trailer reception, a scheduling vote of confidence that studios don't make lightly. Video-game adaptations have gone from punchline to reliable performers in recent years, and a summer-adjacent slot signals the studio expects this one to clear its predecessor comfortably.
What the 2026 numbers actually say
Pull back from May and look at the year's leaderboard, and a clear story emerges. Here are the top-grossing films of 2026 by domestic gross, per Box Office Mojo:
| Rank | Film | Domestic gross |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Super Mario Galaxy Movie | $424.5M |
| 2 | Project Hail Mary | $340.4M |
| 3 | Michael | $319.9M |
| 4 | The Devil Wears Prada 2 | $200.0M |
| 5 | Hoppers | $166.0M |
| 7 | Scream 7 | $121.9M |
Three things jump out. First, animation and family films lead — The Super Mario Galaxy Movie tops the year, and Pixar's Hoppers sits in the top five, confirming that the family audience is the most reliable theatrical demographic. Second, the chart is diverse in genre: a video-game animation, a hard-sci-fi adaptation (Project Hail Mary, from the author of The Martian), a music biopic (Michael), a legacy comedy sequel, and a horror franchise entry. That spread is healthy — a box office propped up by a single genre is fragile; one with hits across animation, sci-fi, biopic, comedy, and horror is broad-based.
Third, and most encouraging for exhibitors: these are big numbers spread across many films, not one mega-blockbuster carrying a dead year. A recovery built on five or six $150M-plus films across different audiences is sturdier than one built on a lone billion-dollar outlier.
Earlier in the year set the table
May didn't come out of nowhere. The first quarter gave exhibitors momentum: Scream 7 opened to $63.6 million on its way past $120 million, Project Hail Mary crossed $300 million domestically (and over $600 million worldwide), and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie sailed past $800 million globally. A strong Q1 is what gives a May slate the cultural oxygen to perform — moviegoing is habit-forming, and the habit had already been rebuilt before summer arrived.
Streaming plays the other side
While theatres chase event films, the streamers spent May 2026 counter-programming with prestige and variety — betting that the at-home audience wants range, not spectacle. The slate, as catalogued by Variety, is unusually film-festival-flavoured:
- HBO Max leaned into auteur and pop-culture buzz: Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights and Charli XCX's The Moment, the latter one of Sundance's biggest premieres.
- Hulu picked up Sam Raimi's horror-comedy Send Help after a solid theatrical run — the increasingly common "play theatres, then stream" sequence.
- Netflix went wide on variety: the animated Swapped, the comedy Ladies First with Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike, and Remarkably Bright Creatures, an adaptation of the bestselling novel fronted by Sally Field.
The pattern is the real story. Theatres increasingly own the communal event — the films you want to see opening weekend with a crowd — while streaming owns range and convenience: the prestige drama, the book adaptation, the comedy you'll watch on a Tuesday. The old zero-sum framing ("streaming is killing cinema") looks more and more like a division of labour than a war. Films like Send Help moving from theatres to Hulu show the two windows feeding each other rather than cannibalizing.
The global picture, and where India fits
The domestic U.S. chart is only half the story. Several of 2026's biggest films earned the larger share of their money outside North America — The Super Mario Galaxy Movie cleared more than $800 million worldwide, and Project Hail Mary crossed $600 million globally — a reminder that a modern tentpole's fate is decided across dozens of markets at once, not just on opening weekend in Los Angeles.
India is an increasingly important piece of that math. Hollywood's animation and big-franchise titles — exactly the genres leading 2026 — travel well in Indian multiplexes, even as they compete with a domestic film industry that remains one of the most prolific and commercially powerful on the planet. The interesting dynamic isn't Hollywood versus Indian cinema; it's that both are chasing the same scarce thing — the event film audiences will pay a premium to see now, on the biggest screen available. A Mandalorian & Grogu and a major domestic Indian release aren't really substitutes; they're both bets that the theatrical "event" still has pull. The window between theatrical release and streaming availability — now often measured in weeks rather than the months that were once standard — is the lever that decides how much of that premium theatres get to keep before the couch becomes an option.
The recovery is real, but it's selective
It's worth resisting the temptation to declare theatrical fully healed. The honest read of 2026 so far is that the recovery is real but selective. What's working is clear:
- Family and animation remain the most dependable theatrical draws.
- Recognizable IP and legacy brands — Star Wars, Mortal Kombat, The Devil Wears Prada — get audiences off the couch.
- Event positioning matters: the films that feel like a must-see-now cultural moment outperform.
What remains uncertain is whether mid-budget originals without a built-in brand can thrive theatrically, or whether they've largely migrated to streaming for good. The 2026 chart is dominated by sequels, adaptations, and franchises; the genuinely original, non-IP theatrical hit is still the exception. That's the structural question hanging over the recovery.
What to watch
- The Mandalorian & Grogu's multiplier. Whether a streaming-born franchise can sustain a theatrical run — not just open big, but hold over multiple weekends — is a template-setting result for the whole streaming-to-cinema strategy.
- Devil Wears Prada 2's legs and global take. A legacy comedy outperforming expectations domestically raises the question of how it travels. Strong international and sustained domestic numbers would prove there's a reliable adult audience theatres can court beyond the family crowd.
- The summer slate. May is the on-ramp to summer, Hollywood's most important stretch. Whether the broad-based momentum of early 2026 carries through the season will determine if this is a genuine recovery year or a strong start that faded.
- The theatrical-streaming windows. Watch how quickly May's theatrical films hit streaming. The length of that exclusive window is the single biggest lever shaping moviegoing economics — and it's still being renegotiated film by film.
The takeaway from May 2026 is measured optimism. The Devil Wears Prada 2 proved a smart, adult-skewing film can be a genuine hit; the year's leaderboard shows depth across genres rather than dependence on one giant; and streaming has settled into a complementary role instead of a purely competitive one. The movies aren't out of the woods — but for the first time in a while, the path out looks like more than wishful thinking.
