The Devil Wears Prada 2 (20th Century Studios, Wendy Finerman Productions, Sunswept Entertainment, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 12) I went with the Bears San Diego to the AMC Mission Valley 20 theatre to see the film The Devil Wears Prada 2, whose existence is something of a surprise because while I’d been aware that the original The Devil Wears Prada had been a hit, I hadn’t realized it had been a big enough hit to merit a sequel. The Devil Wears Prada began as a novel by Lauren Weisberger from 2003, which was first filmed three years later with Meryl Streep starring as Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of Runway magazine – a thinly disguised portrayal of the real-life Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue. I’d caught up with The Devil Wears Prada on Lifetime, of all places, in early 2023 and posted about it to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-devil-wears-prada-fox-2000-pictures.html, and re-reading that was helpful in deciphering last night’s film. Weisberger published a sequel to her novel, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, in 2013, and the original producers came sniffing around to her with sequel in their minds. But they couldn’t get the original stars – Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci – to agree. Streep repeatedly turned it down, and Hathaway said she’d like to work with Streep again but on a totally different story. With the rights having passed from 20th Century-Fox to Walt Disney Studios (which bought Rupert Murdoch’s entire movie enterprise so Murdoch would have that many more billions to spend in turning the entire world’s politics Rightward), Disney started work on a sequel in 2024. They hired the original director, David Frankel, and assigned Aline Brosh McKenna to create a new script with no resemblance to Weisberger’s Revenge Wears Prada. We know that because Weisberger’s credit this time around only says, “Based on characters created by … .”

The story picks up the original characters of The Devil Wears Prada 20 years later and closely recycles the events of the first film. Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has left Runway magazine and built an illustrious career as an investigative reporter for the (fictitious) New York Vanguard, only the Vanguard’s owners have decided print journalism is so 19th century. They suddenly and without advance notice close the paper and send the entire staff layoff notices via text messages, which they receive while they’re at a banquet honoring journalists and Andy Sachs is winning an award for her latest exposé. Meanwhile, Runway magazine is having troubles of its own; they hyped a clothing manufacturer that turned out to make all its good at a sweatshop in Thailand. Runway’s publisher, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), has the brainstorm to hire Andy to set up an investigative unit at Runway to rehabilitate its credibility. But he doesn’t tell Miranda Priestly about this in advance, so Andy just shows up at the Runway offices, ready to work, and has to face one of Miranda’s celebrated cold rages. Meanwhile, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Andy’s rival at Runway in the old days, has switched sides in the fashion industry and is now working at Dior, which holds up Miranda and Runway for the proverbial king’s ransom in exchange for continuing to advertise in Runway. Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), Miranda’s right-hand man in both films, tries to explain to her that virtually nobody reads the print edition of Runway anymore; the real money lays in digital outreach, and that means the editorial content has to be reworked in favor of shorter stories with obvious hooks that will serve as clickbait. One of the old Runway stories was about a high-tech power couple, Benji (Justin Theroux) and Sasha (Lucy Liu) Barnes, who were portrayed as deliriously happy with each other. Since then Benji and Sasha have broken up, and Andy makes her bones at the new Runway by scoring an interview with the famously reclusive Sasha.

Meanwhile, Miranda is lobbying Irv Ravitz for a promotion to run media content for his entire company, Elias-Clarke, only at the big party at which Irv is supposed to announce this he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack instead. Runway and the entire Elias-Clarke enterprise is inherited by Ravitz’s son Jay (B. J. Novak), who couldn’t care less about the fashion world or Runway’s unique role in it. Andy and Emily lobby Benji Barnes to do a white-knight buyout of Runway, only Benji, who’s been dating Emily, intends to double-cross Andy and Miranda, take over Runway, and install Emily as the new editor. He also wants to cut way back on the human role in creating the magazine’s content and rely on AI instead. As soon as Andy learns of this, she organizes her own white-knight buyout with Sasha as her backer. It seems Sasha’s motive is more to double-cross her ex than anything else, but she makes a bid not only for Runway but the entire Elias-Clarke company, and agrees to give Miranda the promotion to worldwide editorial control of the Elias-Clarke enterprise that Irv Ravitz was going to give her when he croaked. All this happens while Runway is hosting a huge fashion event in Milan (the counterpart to the one in Paris in the earlier film), with Lady Gaga (playing herself and really energizing the movie) performing a new song called “Shape of a Woman.” Lady Gaga, who’s one of my favorite current stars because she writes songs with recognizable beginnings, middles, and ends instead of just barking out a few words over a dance groove and calling it a “song,” also wrote two other pieces for the soundtrack, “Runway” and “Glamorous Life.” She essentially serves the same role Madonna did in the earlier film, though once again the soundtrack contains Madonna’s mega-hit “Vogue.” (Once again, I loved the irony that the film contained a song with the same title as the real magazine on which the fictitious Runway is based.)

One of the film’s greatest gags is about Jay Ravitz’s cost-cutting strategies; he’s forbidden Runway’s staff to travel in private cars or planes, and it’s delicious to watch Miranda have to fly as an ordinary business-class passenger and be told to her fury that the terms of her ticket don’t allow the airline to serve her champagne. There’s also a subplot in which Andy, while shopping for a new apartment in a renovated old building and unwittingly insults the man who redeveloped it, Stuart Simmons (Kenneth Branagh), only to end up falling in love, or at least dating him. There are also nice references to the bodybuilding spree Benji Barnes goes on after his divorce (inspired, I suppose, by the real-life physical trainings high-tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook – excuse me, Meta – have gone through, apparently under the belief that if they’re going to be Masters of the Universe they should build up their own bodies so they’ll look more like gods and less like nerds). I liked The Devil Wears Prada 2 but a) it’s not as good as the original (most sequels aren’t, though I can think of at least three that improved on their originals: James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein; Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part Two; and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part Two) and b) it contains enough “digs” against capitalism to qualify as mildly progressive but not so many as to suggest there are any serious alternatives to a system that lets the super-rich pretty much run the world however they want. The consensus of most of the audience members I overheard after the movie was over was it wasn’t as good as the first one, and it would be almost incomprehensible if you hadn’t seen the original film (which might be overstating it a bit, but just a bit).