Florals for a Sequel? Groundbreaking: “The Devil Wears Prada 2” Struts Onto Fandango at Home
A legacy sequel arriving twenty years after the original is precisely the sort of thing Miranda Priestly would greet with a slow blink and a barely audible “that’s all.” And yet here we are. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is now available on Fandango at Home, and rather than the embarrassing cash-grab the cynics predicted, it turned out to be one of the year’s genuine crowd-pleasers, strutting to an opening weekend north of $233 million. The devil, it seems, still sells.
Getting the Band Back Together
The reunion is the whole pitch, and it delivers the goods. Meryl Streep is back as Miranda, Anne Hathaway returns as Andy Sachs, Emily Blunt reprises Emily, and Stanley Tucci slips back into Nigel’s impeccable tailoring, all under returning director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna. Hathaway has described the experience as getting the band back together to play new songs while the crowd still wants the old hits, which is the exact tightrope a legacy sequel has to walk. This one mostly keeps its heels under it.
The new runway of faces is stacked. Kenneth Branagh turns up as, of all improbable things, Miranda’s love interest, a sentence I did not expect to type this year. Lucy Liu, Justin Theroux, Simone Ashley, B.J. Novak, and Pauline Chalamet join the ranks, plus a runway’s worth of surprise cameos I will not spoil, though the internet already cheerfully did.
The Devil Has to Ask Nicely Now
Here is the wrinkle that makes the sequel more than a victory-lap fashion show, and the one the marketing keeps politely underselling. Twenty years on, Runway is a print magazine in a world that stopped buying print magazines. Miranda’s empire is under threat, and the advertising money she needs to keep it breathing sits with a luxury conglomerate whose newly powerful executive happens to be Emily, her old, endlessly abused first assistant. So the great Miranda Priestly, high priestess of the withering put-down, now has to go hat in hand to the woman who once lived in terror of her.
That is the “glow-up” the featurette teases, and it is a genuinely satisfying inversion. Watching Streep play Miranda as someone forced to adapt, to fly coach, to endure the indignity of a staff cafeteria and a summoned rideshare, is where the movie locates both its comedy and its unexpected pathos. Streep, by every account, had a blast this time around, and it shows in every frame.
A Cerulean-Sized Hit
The knock on the original Devil Wears Prada was always that its fashion-industry satire had no teeth, that it drooled over the very luxury it pretended to critique. The sequel does not particularly fix that, and if you were immune to the first film’s charms you will be immune here too. But the enormous audience that simply wants glamour, banter, and three movie stars firing on all cylinders does not care, and at a $233 million opening, neither does the ledger. It holds a Certified Fresh 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is roughly the critical consensus for “better than it had any right to be.”
What that box office quietly proves is something Hollywood keeps forgetting and having to relearn at great expense: there is a massive, underserved appetite for glossy, grown-up, women-fronted studio comedies. It is the same lesson buried in a movie like Private Benjamin, which every studio told Goldie Hawn not to make before it became a monster hit. The conventional wisdom on these films is reliably, expensively wrong. Miranda would not be even slightly surprised.
Gird Your Wallet
To the particulars. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is available on Fandango at Home to own for $29.99 or rent for $24.99. The savvier move, and the one most on-brand for a franchise obsessed with knowing the true value of things, is the two-movie collection bundle at $39.99, which nets you both the 2006 original and its sequel for only ten dollars more than the new one alone. That is the home-video equivalent of pairing this season’s trends with a vintage staple, which, to its credit, is exactly how the release frames it. There is also an exclusive featurette if you want a look at how the sequel updated its icons.
One honest note for the budget-conscious, since I am not in the business of selling you anything: the film also lands on Disney+ on July 29, so if you subscribe and can wait a few weeks, patience has its rewards. If you want it in your permanent collection right now, Fandango has you covered.
That’s All
The real tell for how this went is that David Frankel, who once swore up and down there would never be a sequel, now flatly refuses to rule out a third. He said “never again” once, he notes, and look how that turned out, so he is officially done saying never again about anything. Twenty years ago, as the film reminds us, a million girls would have killed for this job. It turns out a good number of them grew up, kept their subscription to the fantasy, and were more than happy to buy the sequel. Gird your loins accordingly.
