Two massive theatrical successes and one small-scale disappointment show why box-office results alone do not tell the whole story of Anne Hathaway’s year. Her response to Mother Mary also points to the delicate line actors walk when discussing a film that found critical admirers but few ticket buyers.
Anne Hathaway has had a highly successful 2026 through major roles in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and The Devil Wears Prada 2. But Hathaway admits that one of her films was a flop: A24’s Mother Mary, a much smaller and more divisive release that earned about $3 million worldwide against a reported $20 million budget.
The contrast matters because it captures the unusual shape of a movie star’s big year. Hathaway’s 2026 includes two of the year’s biggest theatrical wins, yet her comments on Mother Mary suggest she is not pretending every project lands with the same audience.
Two enormous hits define 2026
Hathaway played Penelope in Nolan’s Greek epic The Odyssey, which was released July 17. According to figures reported by The Independent, the film has passed $1.1 billion globally, moving ahead of The Dark Knight Rises to become the highest-grossing film of Nolan’s career.
Her other major success came with The Devil Wears Prada 2, in which she returned as Runway journalist Andy Sachs. The sequel reunited Hathaway with Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt, tapping into a fan base built by the 2006 original while putting the characters into a new fashion-world story.
Released in May, the sequel grossed more than $691.3 million worldwide on a reported $100 million production budget, The Independent reported. Those are blockbuster-scale results, especially at a moment when many studio releases have struggled to turn brand recognition into sustained ticket sales.
Mother Mary was the outlier
Then there was Mother Mary. The A24 film cast Hathaway as a pop star forced to confront her past when she reconnects with a former costume designer, played by Michaela Coel.
It was a markedly different proposition from a Nolan spectacle or an eagerly awaited studio sequel: more intimate, stranger in tone and aimed at a narrower audience. The film received mixed reviews and, by the conventional box-office measure, did not connect. Its reported $3 million global gross sits far below its reported $20 million budget.
That does not automatically settle whether the film succeeded artistically. Box office measures ticket revenue, not the long-term life of a film in streaming, repertory viewing or devoted fan communities. Still, the financial gap is too wide to recast as a routine underperformance.
Hathaway chose careful language
While promoting her upcoming film The End of Oak Street, Hathaway was asked by Extra TV about her unusually busy year. “There’s a lot going on,” she said, before drawing a distinction between the results of her releases.
“Thankfully, two movies have done unbelievably well and one movie… was very well respected,” Hathaway added with a smile, according to The Independent. It was a diplomatic answer, but it also made the contrast clear: respect and revenue are not interchangeable.
The phrasing quickly became part of the conversation online. Some viewers treated it as a wry acknowledgment of Mother Mary’s commercial result. Others pushed back on the idea that a film made for a more specialized audience should be judged solely against the scale of studio tentpoles.
Respect does not guarantee receipts
Mother Mary currently holds a 69% score on Rotten Tomatoes, according to the report, a middling result that reflects a mixed critical response rather than universal rejection. Several reviews highlighted its ambition while questioning whether its psychological drama fully came together.
The divide around the film is familiar. Riskier movies can draw passionate defenders precisely because they do not play like a conventional crowd-pleaser. But a devoted response from part of the audience does not erase the commercial challenge facing an original film with a sizable budget.
That is the tension in Hathaway’s year. The Odyssey and The Devil Wears Prada 2 benefited from powerful commercial engines: a major filmmaker, large-scale spectacle, established intellectual property and broad international appeal. Mother Mary had a different creative identity and a different financial outcome.
A stronger measure of star power
It would be easy to frame Mother Mary as the blemish on an otherwise flawless run. A more useful reading is that Hathaway’s slate shows the range actors need to maintain in a theatrical market split between giant event movies and harder-to-sell originals.
Her role choices placed her in two heavily marketed global successes while also putting her at the center of a more experimental A24 release. The first two demonstrate lasting audience appetite for Hathaway in recognizable, large-scale projects. The third shows that even a well-known actor cannot guarantee a commercial breakthrough for every kind of movie.
Hathaway next appears in The End of Oak Street, alongside Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. The film, about a family encountering unsettling prehistoric events in its neighborhood, is scheduled for theatrical release August 14.
The real takeaway from her year
Hathaway’s 2026 is not simply a story of two hits and one flop. It is a reminder that box-office performance belongs to films, not just the actors who appear in them. Budget, distribution, genre, release strategy and audience expectations all shape the final number.
Her unusually candid distinction between “unbelievably well” and “very well respected” may be the most revealing part. It acknowledges a commercial disappointment without dismissing the work or the people who connected with it. In a year dominated by billion-dollar benchmarks, that may be the clearest description of what a complicated success looks like.
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