OVERVIEW
A long-awaited sequel to the 2006 infinitely memeable hit, The Devil Wears Prada 2 picks up twenty years later, with Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) now a respected investigative journalist who, after a layoff, begrudgingly takes a Features Editor job back at Runway, the magazine she once fled. Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is still in charge, with Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) still by her side, but the world around them has changed, with print collapsing and attention spans shrinking to seconds. Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Miranda’s other former assistant, is now a senior executive at Dior, sitting on the advertising money Runway needs to survive.
BACKGROUND
Never doubt the power of Meryl Streep. After almost being passed over in 2006 for not being recognized as funny enough, she turned the juicily written role of Miranda Priestly into a cultural staple, earning an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win, with Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt matching her note for note in the roles that would launch them into the careers they have now. Twenty years later, the role becomes the first leading part Streep has fully reprised across a six-decade career (the Mamma Mia 2 cameo doesn’t count). The sequel follows a completely new screenplay, ignoring Lauren Weisberger’s two follow-up novels, Revenge Wears Prada and When Life Gives You Lululemons, which gave Frankel and McKenna room to write Miranda and Andy into the world as it is now rather than the one Weisberger imagined a decade ago. With shoots in Manhattan, Newark, Milan, and Lake Como, and a budget of around $100 million, nearly triple the original, The Devil Wears Prada 2 claims the first weekend of the Hollywood summer, the slot Disney pulled from Avengers: Doomsday to make room for it. “That’s all,” indeed.
THE REVIEW
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a delightful sequel that will please fans of the original, providing a great amount of callbacks in the form of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos and recurring jokes. Like the first one, it moves in a crowd-pleasing, fast-paced way, rarely catching its breath as it shifts characters through an amusing chain of events.
Where it succeeds the most, and where this matters most for legacy sequels, is in justifying its existence, taking characters to natural places worthy of a new story being told. Here is where Frankel and McKenna use the opportunity to make a statement on the current state of our society, encompassing what has become of journalism, of art, of anything that requires thought in a world of content reels and noise.
For a highly budgeted Disney film aimed at a huge audience, the script does a surprisingly thoughtful job of capturing the state of a time that leaves people concerned about the increasingly accelerated narrowing of opportunities and door closings. A mid-film line from Nigel about how audiences are now consuming the once-pivotal magazine, paired with a late-film metaphor Miranda draws from the sinking of the Titanic, finds a great balance, landing straight to the point without being on the nose or forced.
In that sense, all four main performances contribute to the feeling, wearing the costumes and having as much fun as if they never left the characters (none of them physically looks like a day has passed). Hathaway, Blunt, and Streep lean into their long-built chemistry to the point that simply seeing the characters together in the same space becomes a draw in itself.
Hathaway gets the short end of the stick, with her character being too naive considering what she learned in the first film, how much time has passed, and what Hathaway has come to embody as a screen presence. I doubt Streep will earn repeat Oscar attention for what is essentially the same performance, but she remains a hoot to watch, making the most of every single second and line. Blunt is Blunt. The MVP is once again Tucci, who is the most effortlessly funny of the four while bringing real honesty to the performance. Nigel is the character that best captures the loss the script keeps describing, looking past the trio’s personal stakes. The hints of disappointment and hopelessness in his performance land, and they are what the film actually leaves behind.
The film lacks truly memorable new supporting characters. Especially considering what the first did for the then-unknown Blunt, it is hard to see the same happening for any of the new cast. At the same time, the Mission: Impossible-lite sequences, like the scene in the first film where Andy needs to get the Harry Potter manuscript to the twins, are largely downplayed here, happening mostly in the background, and they are missed. The whole sequence involving Lucy Liu truly needed more anticipation. There are still plenty of memorable snippets to make it worthwhile and encourage repeat viewings.
It sits a small step below the original in entertainment value, though thankfully free of annoying self-righteous characters like the insufferable boyfriend in the first film.
It sits a small step below the original in pure entertainment value, even if it is thankfully free of annoying self-righteous characters like Andy’s insufferable boyfriend in the first film. I am probably not the ideal person to judge where the extravagant dresses and fashion-world details stand against the original (my fashion expertise goes about as far as knowing when a jacket looks expensive). Theodore Shapiro’s returning themes also provide a useful sense of continuity, serving not merely as nostalgia but also as a reminder that this world used to operate on a lighter rhythm. The sequel’s shift away from the original’s cleaner rom-com shape and toward a broader reflection on media and attention gives it a reason to exist beyond the callbacks. It may not be quite as funny or effortlessly rewatchable as the first film, but it is more thoughtful than expected, and that trade-off more than works in its favor.FINAL THOUGHTS
Just this weekend, I was chatting with my friends about how the late 2000s were the peak. Technology was improving our lives, but we still had to drive to Blockbuster to pick the film we’d spend our weekend with. Fast-forward to now, with the AI explosion in full force, a film like No Other Choice, where a worker has to literally kill the competition to get a job, doesn’t feel like fiction anymore. The optimism I held onto in January when I watched The AI Doc, the belief that the old gets rebuilt into the new, the way it always has, gets harder to hold every day. There is a brief moment in The Devil Wears Prada 2 where Peter, played by Patrick Brammall, makes exactly that case to Andy. It is the only hopeful line in a film that otherwise mourns the death of slow attention. Beneath all the glitter and pizzazz, Prada is a cry for help. A franchise kept commercially viable for twenty years by being clipped, edited, and recirculated for the algorithm now spends two hours mourning the world that does the clipping and has earned the right to be heard.