Miranda Priestly may be the world’s worst boss, but there’s a reason for her viciousness. She’s a genius, a visionary, and she mistreats her employees not out of sadism or malice but because they are impeding her divine greatness. She is unconquerable—or so we thought. The Devil Wears Prada 2, the intriguing and maddening sequel to the 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s novel, finds Miranda locked in battle—not just for the future of her company, Runway, but for the soul of an entire industry—and she seems to be losing the war. Her chief adversary isn’t a rival editor or a meddlesome underling but a more pitiless, insidious force: private equity.
Eddies of irony swirl around Prada 2, not least that a mercenary brand extension to a 20-year-old property purports to extol the virtues of old-fashioned creativity. But the screenplay, by Aline Brosh McKenna, deserves partial credit for grappling with genuine ideas, rather than simply drafting off of its predecessor’s legacy. Consider the movie’s opening scene, which finds Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Miranda’s former assistant who fled Runway for more fulfilling pastures, accepting an award for her hard-hitting reporting at the fictional New York Vanguard. At first, such feting of journalism feels horribly self-congratulatory and dated—what is this, Sweet Smell of Success?—but just as Andy’s name is called, she and the rest of her noble colleagues receive a text informing them of their mass firing. She might as well sell that trophy for rent money, if only anyone would buy it.
Set aside its glitzy melodrama—the high-end clothes, the catty backbiting, the celebrity cameos (more on those later)—and Prada 2 is a movie about media literacy in the age of TikTok. Andy, starved for income and facing a frozen labor market, lucks into a job as Runway’s features editor, where she’s tasked with using her sterling reputation to shepherd the periodical through a PR crisis. She’s a talented writer—we know this based on a montage that shows her feverishly typing into a CMS and clicking “Publish”—but do her long-form essays generate actual revenue? “Uh uh,” clucks Nigel (Stanley Tucci), Miranda’s incisive consigliere, when asked about “the metrics.” What’s quality reportage compared to clickbait listicles and makeup tutorials?
I’m skeptical that Prada 2, which was again directed by David Frankel, depicts what it’s like to work at a magazine with any degree of realism. But it does grasp what it’s like to just work in 2026: the late-capitalism pressure, the omnipresent threat of AI, the fear of your own obsolescence. This angst isn’t limited to Andy. Miranda, despite Meryl Streep’s arched eyebrows and equally high cheekbones, has become less of an empress and more of a middle manager. Sure, she still lords over staff meetings with acidic regality (though an assistant regularly chides her for her insensitive comments), but she’s stuck in career limbo, hoping that Runway’s parent company will recognize her achievements and name her its new “global head of content.”
The banality of that title doesn’t seem to register in McKenna’s script, which otherwise makes some notable tweaks to the original film’s formula. The hook of Prada 2—the presumed reason it got made—is the triangular reunion of Hathaway, Streep, and Emily Blunt; the latter returns as Emily, Andy’s once-fellow sufferer of Miranda’s capricious wrath who has since switched teams in the fashion world and now works at Dior. Their crisscross relationships retain a shiver of feminist antagonism, but the real villains of the sequel are rich, careless men. One is Jay (B.J. Novak), a corporate scion who inherits Miranda’s conglomerate and whose first instinct is to bring in a consulting firm to slash costs. The other is Benji (Justin Theroux), a patently Muskian caricature—unimpressed with calls to colonize Mars, he’d prefer a rocket that heads straight for the sun (“I’m going to call it the Icarus”)—whose social ineptitude is matched only by his willingness to strip-mine companies for parts.
It’s all troublingly familiar, and the contemporary gloss makes Prada 2 surprisingly interesting, even resonant. It just doesn’t make it good.
This isn’t to say the movie is bad company. The actors are all pleasant, and they’re outfitted in some colorful and expensive-looking fabrics (though the costume design here pales compared to the bravura intensity of Wuthering Heights). But their inherent charm is muted by clunky plotting and stilted writing. The primary story arc, involving Andy’s surreptitious efforts to safeguard Miranda’s position, is a clumsy and tedious tale of corporate warfare, featuring questionable stakes and dubious reveals. There is also a putative romance between Andy and a contractor (Evil’s Patrick Brammall), but their flirty banter is as stiff as their complications are contrived. Additional conceits—Nigel’s loyalty, Emily’s jealousy, Miranda’s anxiety—are all just sort of there, an outline of bullet points that haven’t been arranged into a coherent feature.
Of course, the narrative machinations of a Devil Wears Prada picture are meant to be subservient to the fizziness of the atmosphere. Yet the movie’s look is televisual, as though Frankel is simply letting the fancy attire displace his obligation to imbue the film with any aesthetic style. (The one exception: a striking shot of Miranda standing on a vacant Italian street, flanked by glowering storefronts for Prada and Louis Vuitton.) More problematic is that the dialogue carries little energy or wit. Here’s Nigel on the Hamptons: “I once put together a whole suite of summer looks for RBG, and she slayed.” Good one, I guess?
Tucci delivers that line with his customary verve, but the name-drop underscores the movie’s irritating, self-satisfied quality. Mercifully, Adrian Grenier doesn’t reprise his role as Andy’s useless boyfriend, but Prada 2’s insistence on populating its retinue with celebrities carries a whiff of Entourage. The “as themselves” cameo list is longer than the principal cast—look, it’s Heidi Klum! it’s Karl-Anthony Towns! it’s a megawatt pop star whose very identity constitutes a spoiler!—as though littering the screen with famous faces substitutes for creating characters who do or say anything interesting.
Which is a shame, because again, the movie is interesting, in a time-capsule sort of way. Yet for all its surface thoughtfulness about the modern media landscape, The Devil Wears Prada 2 eschews any true thematic inquiry (to say nothing of actual entertainment), ultimately lapsing into a chintzy form of fan service. There are triumphs and reconciliations and heroic rescues, the screenplay sweatily assuring us that each of our fave girlbosses remains indomitable. Maybe it’s silly of me to kvetch about a cheerful fashion flick being insufficiently rigorous, but it’s telling that the film ends up resembling one of those disposable puff pieces which offends Andy’s journalistic dignity. You don’t watch this movie, you click on it.
Grade: C+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.