The Devil Wears Prada 2

What is the half-life of a grudge, or of a favorable opinion? The original The Devil Wears Prada ended with Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), Runway magazine’s imperious editor-in-chief and a barely veiled riff on Anna Wintour, sidelining Nigel (Stanley Tucci) to save herself, while still giving Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) a favorable reference after Andy walked out on her in the middle of Paris Fashion Week. The answer, it seems, is two decades. Grudges become good graces, and good graces fade into oblivion, in a well-intentioned follow-up to a comfort-cinema classic.

Their future, our present, is bleak. Even with David Frankel and Aline Brosh McKenna returning behind the camera and on the page, the sequel cannot quite recover the early-2000s romcom gloss; it has less to do with its characters than with the institutions and establishments they guard. Journalism takes more of a central role this time, but mostly as a vessel for familiar laments about the state of the industry: no one reads, quality reporting is meaningless without traffic, lay-offs and downsizing are inevitable, and consolidation has hollowed everything out.

After building a 20-year career in journalism and losing her latest job to yet another newspaper closure, Andy finds her way back to her alma labour, this time as a features editor rather than another Emily. Miranda, meanwhile, is being considered for a promotion to chief of global content, only for the appointment to be thrown into jeopardy by a scandal at Runway. Andy’s return becomes part rescue mission, part professional reckoning, pulling her back into Miranda’s orbit as the magazine tries to protect its relevance in a media landscape no longer inclined to worship at the altar of print prestige.

What follows is a barrage of good zingers, many of them delivered by Tucci’s Nigel and Emily Blunt’s Emily, who now works at Dior and lives by the self-professed mantra: “May the bridges I burn light my way.”

The star-studded cast, at least, understands the assignment. Every returning player, especially the central quartet of Streep, Hathaway, Tucci and Blunt, seems to slip back into the phantom of a character that has evidently stayed with them over the past 20 years. The pleasure is less in transformation than in recognition; the tilt of Miranda’s head, Andy’s practiced alertness, Nigel’s acidic warmth, Emily’s weaponised survival instinct. Everyone who is anyone appears to have been summoned to the party, with cameos from Lady Gaga and Jon Batiste among others, but the most understated delight may be Kenneth Branagh as Miranda’s new husband, a composer whose presence softens the edges around her without sanding them down.

But what made the original feel like a breath of fresh air makes the sequel feel like just another entry in a crowded field of contemporary institutional satires, complete with archetypal tech billionaires, tasteless media empire heirs and characters who, two decades later, have not changed nearly as much as the world around them.

As someone who writes about arts and culture, chiefly film, I found it difficult not to respond to the sequel’s portrait of a collapsing media landscape. Yet The Devil Wears Prada 2, like many films before it, reveres the institution more than the craft that built it. It treats the possible death of Runway as if it were the death of journalism itself, when the more uncomfortable truth is that many legacy media behemoths have long been compromised by the very systems they claim to critique. Every country seems to have its own variation on Rupert Murdoch, its own version of the mogul whose money shapes taste, attention and access.

Perhaps it is asking too much of a film of this calibre to acknowledge that rot directly, or to imagine that younger writers might need to build new institutions capable of correcting course. But that feels almost impossible in the present climate, where living in a cultural centre like New York requires money few writers have, while everyone else is left to perish, or at least perform resilience, in Substack hell. The economic contradiction is unintentionally emphasised by Andy’s new life. After 20 years of work, she can finally afford to rent a decent apartment in an up-and-coming, gentrified neighborhood.

Like its predecessor, the sequel sells an aesthetic as a palpable goal, but it also moves the goalposts. In the original, the fantasy was that all you needed was an entry point, even as an assistant in a field you did not necessarily love, and eventually you might end up in Paris, or somewhere like it. In the sequel, the fantasy is more modest and more depressing. By your mid-40s, after a lifetime of professional compromises, you might finally be able to rent a dignified apartment.

The same lowering of stakes shapes Andy’s professional assignment. In the original, she had to hunt down an unpublished Harry Potter manuscript for Miranda’s daughters – well, children these days and reading – a task pitched somewhere between fairy tale and workplace nightmare. Here, she has to secure an interview with a billionaire divorcee. It is less absurd, more plausible, and in its own way more dispiriting. The film does get one thing right about journalism: so much of it depends on knowing people who know people, on the social choreography of access that turns proximity into opportunity.

The Devil Wears Prada 2’s anxieties about journalism are not wrong, but they are too attached to the romance of the old gatekeepers. If there is anything worth taking seriously here, it is not the idea that institutions must be preserved at all costs, but that writing itself still requires readers. Journalism survives not because a famous magazine survives, but because people continue to make time for reported, argued, edited work in a culture increasingly designed to replace it with the frictionless dopamine of the scroll.

Reviewed on: 30 Apr 2026