The Devil Wears Prada 2: a glossy nostalgia trip
Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway return for a sequel torn between crowd-pleasing callbacks and anxious meditations on the decline of print media and the rise of AI.
Noughties nostalgia, the Hollywood trend which brought us Freakier Friday (2025) and less happily Happy Gilmore 2 (2025), shoots its biggest shot yet with Devil Wears Prada 2. The original frothy, sharp-tongued 2006 fashion-mag satire became a beloved comfort watch, warily guarded by its many fans. This big beast among legacy sequels is determined not to squander its goodwill or good name by straying too far from the original formula.
Anyone expecting a warm bath of a film evoking a less fraught era is in for a surprise. The sequel is a bold, sometimes uneven mix of nostalgic retread, with pleas for a print medium in its death throes. Now an award-winning journalist, a newly redundant Andy (Anne Hathaway) is catapaulted back to a scandal-mired Runway magazine to rehabilitate it, after editor-in-chief Miranda is ‘cancelled’ online for glowing coverage of a fashion line secretly using sweatshop labour.
The film is both sharp-eyed and playful about the perilous status of tastemakers, and the precarity of print journalism. A declawed Miranda (a wry, quietly imperious Streep) is forced to grovel before powerful advertisers like Dior, now represented by Andy’s one-time rival Emily Charlton (a hilariously acerbic Emily Blunt). Budgets have been slashed and ‘The September issue is so thin you could floss with it’. But the film wants to be both sharp and sweet at once, and director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna’s obsession with recreating the perky tone and relationships of their original film gets wearisome. Why is experienced Andy still seeking scary Miranda’s validation? Would art director Nigel instantly fall back into being Andy’s teasing BFF: ‘Look what TJ Maxx dragged in’? (Stanley Tucci, dry as a martini, is one of the film’s saving graces). Equally wearing are frequent callbacks to DWP classic scenes, like Nigel’s couture glow-ups for Andy, and a glitzy Milan travelogue peppered with pointless celebrity cameos.
As the magazine falls into real financial jeopardy, the supermodel-skinny plot contorts itself to put Andy into situations where she can struggle to save the day, whilst wearing sequinned Armani Privé. In place of the original’s spiky fashion satire, there is the looming tech takeover of Bezos-style multi-billionaire bro Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), whose AI evangelism is pitched against Miranda’s passion for human creativity. Ultimately, the film can’t pull off its wishful combination of an industry’s existential crisis, and a fairytale ending. But that’s unlikely to bother the many viewers for whom this film sits in a Venn diagram sweetspot encompassing both ‘Girls Night Out’ and ‘Nostalgia Fest’.
► The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in UK cinemas now.