Nearly two decades is a long time. Long enough to forget that sequels to beloved films almost never work. Long enough to convince yourself this one might be different especially when they’ve brought back the same cast, the same director, the same writer. And honestly? The Devil Wears Prada 2 is better than it has any right to be. Just don’t walk in expecting magic.
The setup is clever. Andy Sachs is now an award-winning journalist, the kind who still believes in the long read. She gets laid off, delivers a scorched-earth speech about corporate media at an awards night, and it goes viral. Meanwhile, Runway is dealing with its own crisis it ran a fake brand. To claw back credibility, the magazine rehires Andy as features editor. Miranda, predictably, is not impressed.
What follows is familiar territory, but the film knows that and leans into it. Miranda still has the ice. Andy is still nervous around her, despite twenty years of distance. Nigel is still Nigel. Emily has moved to Dior and now controls what gets into the magazine as its biggest advertiser which, honestly, is the most believable career trajectory in the whole film.
The best scenes belong to Hathaway and Emily Blunt together. There aren’t enough of them. Every time they share the screen, the film loosens up and remembers it’s supposed to be fun. Streep, meanwhile, doesn’t miss a beat. She plays Miranda with the same precision less cruel now, but no less sharp. The character has aged in ways that feel real rather than convenient.
Where the film genuinely earns its place is in how it handles the media landscape. Print dying, influencers eating editorial budgets, AI creeping into the newsroom, management obsessing over traffic while real stories go unread it’s bleak and accurate and handled with more care than I expected. As someone who covers stories for a living, a lot of it hit close.
That said, not everyone is going to feel that. The film’s sharpest observations are aimed at journalists, editors, and people who’ve sat in those rooms. For everyone else, the media commentary might feel like texture rather than story.
Andy’s romance with Peter (Patrick Brammall) doesn’t add much. Justin Theroux’s billionaire character is too loud for the world he’s dropped into he belongs in a different, broader film. And the first twenty minutes drag. The film takes its time finding its footing, and some of that patience is not rewarded.
But the cast pulls it through. They always do. Hathaway, Streep, Blunt they don’t phone it in. They make you care again about characters you last spent time with in 2006, and that’s not nothing.
The original was a one-off. Everyone knew it, and the sequel knows it too. What it does instead is update the world, bring back the people you loved, and trust that’s enough. Mostly, it is.
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