The Devil Wears Prada Is Back and the Industry It’s About Is Gone

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened in theaters May 1. Early reviews are split — Hollywood Reporter calls it “frothy but stuffed with mixed messages,” the Daily Beast goes harder and calls it a “tragically messy knockoff.” Neither of those descriptions is wrong, exactly. Neither of them quite gets at the reason this movie is more interesting than a simple legacy sequel has any right to be. A film about the collapse of print media’s power structure shouldn’t be this resonant in 2026. And yet.

The original came out in 2006 and made $326 million on a $35 million budget. It’s part of the culture’s permanent furniture at this point — Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly is a performance so controlled and specific that it became shorthand for a particular kind of terrifying competence, studied in business schools as much as film programs. Anne Hathaway’s Andy was the accessible entry point. Emily Blunt’s Emily was the one people actually saw themselves in. Stanley Tucci’s Nigel was the one everyone wanted more of. Twenty years later they’re all back — Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, Tucci — along with director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, which is the cast and creative team from the original. The film also adds Kenneth Branagh, Lucy Liu, Justin Theroux, Pauline Chalamet, B.J. Novak, Lady Gaga, and a cameo from Donatella Versace. It was shot in Manhattan and Milan over four months in 2025.

What the film gets right at a structural level is that Miranda’s power wasn’t just personal charisma. It was institutional leverage. For decades, the fashion magazine controlled the full chain: which designers got covered, which models got booked, which trends got credibility, which careers lasted. That concentrated authority made figures like Miranda genuinely consequential — not because they were intimidating, but because the system actually routed through them. The internet didn’t just compete with that authority — it distributed it across a thousand accounts, trend cycles, and platforms that nobody owns. Every Instagram stylist with a million followers and every accelerated TikTok trend cycle is a piece of what Miranda used to own exclusively. The sequel is smart enough to name this. Whether it dramatizes it sharply enough is where critics diverge.

The plot is where it gets structurally interesting. Miranda Priestly isn’t fighting off a young usurper this time — she’s fighting Emily Charlton, Blunt’s character, who has graduated from first assistant to rival luxury brand executive and is competing with Runway for the same shrinking pool of advertising revenue. Miranda is approaching retirement without a clear succession plan. The industry she spent her career commanding is in visible decline. The leverage that made someone like Miranda Priestly genuinely terrifying — the ability to make or end careers with a phone call — has eroded in proportion to the platforms that used to give her that power. Andy returns older and more settled, now operating as a peer rather than a subordinate. The antagonist isn’t a person but a structural shift.

What that premise means is that the sequel has a genuine conflict the original didn’t have. The first film was about what it cost to work for someone like Miranda. This one is about what happens when the empire she built stops working the way it used to — when being the most powerful person in a room stops meaning what it once meant because the room itself is shrinking. Whether the film fully executes this is where critics are diverging. The consensus lands around “enjoyable but uneven” — which, for a sequel nobody was demanding that somehow assembled its entire original creative team nearly twenty years later, is a more impressive outcome than the reviews make it sound. The performances hold. The premise is sound. The execution is where it leaves something on the table.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened to $77 million domestically and $233 million worldwide in its first weekend — one of the biggest live-action theatrical openings of 2026. The original debuted to $27.5 million domestically in 2006; the sequel made that in less than a day. That number answers one question definitively: enough people wanted two hours with this cast in these roles that the commercial math worked regardless of what critics thought. The more interesting question is whether it lands as a film or just as an event. My read on the reviews: it’s the latter. The premise it chose — an empire in managed decline, a power structure that can feel its own erosion — deserved a sharper execution than it got. That said, Emily Blunt in a movie is almost always worth the ticket.

Sources: Hollywood Reporter · Daily Beast · Variety