With that in mind, it was hard to feel excited about Disney’s latest nostalgia play, a twenty-year-later sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. The original, directed by David Frankel, wrapped up Anne Hathaway’s character arc in a way that felt complete. She walked away from the fashion world to stay true to herself, so bringing her back into that same space felt questionable at best.
That’s what makes the sequel surprising. Not only does it find a convincing reason to revisit that story, but it also leans into the realities of making a Devil Wears Prada film in 2026. Instead of coasting on nostalgia, it approaches the material with a level of sincerity that gives it more weight than expected.
TOP 5 THINGS ABOUT THE “DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2”
5. It’s Modern! (Complimentary)
One of the most surprising things about The Devil Wears Prada 2 is how fully it embraces its time and place. While many legacy sequels, especially from Disney, tend to feel like patchwork projects stitched together from half-formed ideas across different eras, this film actually commits to the present. Unlike entries such as Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted, which often lean too heavily on nostalgia, this sequel feels grounded in the modern realities its characters are navigating.
A lot of that credit goes to Aline Brosh McKenna, who returns after writing the original. Instead of playing it safe, she challenges these characters in ways that feel both relevant and necessary. It would have been easy to ignore how much the worlds of fashion, journalism, and art have changed, but the film does the opposite.
Rather than avoiding those shifts, The Devil Wears Prada 2 leans directly into them. It confronts the evolving landscape head-on, adding a layer of authenticity that many sequels in this lane simply lack.
4. It’s Modern! (Derogatory)
But that approach doesn’t come without drawbacks. For as great as much of the explicit modern setting is, the movie also tries to get a lot of mileage out of harping on how workplace culture and societal norms have changed. While some of these gags work, the sheer number of them becomes a bit grating.
Similarly, there’s a lot of legacy sequel material throughout that either explicitly references, quotes, or simply repackages elements from the first film and expects audiences to burst into applause solely on the basis of their memetic value. This kind of thing has been around for years now, but it’s grown so tiresome that I really just don’t have the stomach for this kind of self-indulgent, knowing, winking approach anymore.
3. The Sasha Barnes Interview
The single oddest piece of The Devil Wears Prada 2’s larger puzzle concerns a centerpiece moment in the film, in which Hathaway’s struggling journalist books a big interview with a reclusive icon, Sasha Barnes, played by Lucy Liu. After spending the better part of the film up until now writing copious amounts of online articles but struggling to break through to find success, this is Hathaway’s character’s big chance. It’s reiterated over and over how big a deal this is, and how it could boost the magazine’s profile and lend credence to its new, more gravitas-laden approach to editorial pieces. We even see her doggedly pursuing it for a whole multi-minute montage.
And then when she finally gets said interview… It’s being conducted by Meryl Streep’s character and is being filmed with multiple cameras, implying it isn’t a print interview at all. Wasn’t the whole point of this that, number one, it was going to be a text-based article, and that Hathaway herself would be doing the interview, thus netting her the approval of others? Then, in the next scene, they just refer to it as the “Sasha Barnes article” and talk about how great Hathaway’s writing is, further confusing the whole thing.
Am I really supposed to believe that the big breakthrough article was just a text write-up of a video interview that Miranda Priestly actually did all the work for? It’s an incredibly strange squandering of what should have been a great character moment for Hathaway’s character.
2. The Performances are Great
With my gripes out of the way, let’s get back to the good stuff: the performances in this are fantastic. Specifically, Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and Emily Blunt all bring their A-game here. They are clearly having a great time not only returning to these characters and working with one another again twenty years later, but also further interrogating their own performances and finding new nuances and complexities within them.
I understand the criticism that this sequel loses the clean-cut efficiency of the first film, but it more than makes up for it by allowing all of these characters to continue evolving and adapting under these heightened pressures and circumstances. Special kudos to Aline Brosh McKenna and director David Frankel as well for carving out the kind of time and space needed throughout the runtime to give these moments real resonance and weight. Some of my favorite parts of the film are simply these incredible performers playing off one another so artfully.
1. A Creative Vision, Through and Through
I’ve kind of attempted to bury the lead here, but I think it is unbelievably cool that The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a full-blown reunion, bringing not only the whole cast back together but also the writer and director from the first film. To this end, while there are certainly elements of this sequel that feel tailor-made for mainstream consumption, it does work as a passion project unto itself.
This is a film about the ways in which the fields it’s centered on have become increasingly disillusioned and dire over the past several decades, and it tackles that concept with real heft and articulation. It literally opens with the death of journalism and follows its characters as they attempt to forge a meaningful path forward. All in all, it is such an idiosyncratic work, the kind of thing that would never be greenlit by a major studio were it not attached to a major IP. In this way, I kind of have no choice but to adore The Devil Wears Prada 2, a Trojan Horse of a movie whose core is all about resisting corporate takeovers and gentrification.
RGM GRADE
(B-)
Overall, I think The Devil Wears Prada 2 is neat. There are definitely choices I don’t quite jive with throughout, but by and large, it’s a much stronger film than I was expecting, and perhaps one of the most topical and pertinent works of the year thus far.
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