The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) [Movie review]

In Theaters May 1, 2026 · 20th Century Studios

Andy Sachs is sitting at a journalism awards ceremony, about to accept a prize for a career she has spent twenty years building, when her phone buzzes. Then another phone buzzes. Then twenty phones buzz simultaneously around the same table. They have all been laid off by text message.

She walks to the podium anyway, accepts the award, and delivers a speech insisting that journalism is not dead, it is simply being dismantled. It is the best scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2, and it arrives in the first five minutes. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not quite as sharp as that opening, but it is considerably more interesting than the phrase “twenty-year sequel” usually promises.

The One Where Miranda Priestly Has to Fight for Her Own Magazine

Here is the situation Aline Brosh McKenna walked back into. Twenty years after the original film, the landscape that The Devil Wears Prada satirized with such affectionate precision has collapsed almost completely. Print fashion magazines that wielded absolute cultural authority in 2006 now fight for survival against algorithmic content farms, billionaire vanity acquisitions, and an advertising market that stopped caring about glossy pages somewhere around 2014.

The specific world that made Miranda Priestly frightening, the world where one phone call from her could end a career, where the clothes she chose would determine what the rest of the country thought it wanted, is largely gone. What do you do with a dragon-lady boss when the kingdom she terrorized has burned down?

McKenna’s answer is to make Miranda’s fight for institutional survival the film’s real subject, and it is the right answer. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens with Runway magazine weathering a PR catastrophe: the magazine has accidentally endorsed a sweatshop fast-fashion label, and the reputational damage has its owner Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman, reprising his role from the original) scrambling for cover.

His solution is to hire Andy Sachs, freshly and humiliatingly unemployed, as Runway’s new features editor. The idea is that Andy’s journalistic credibility will provide the magazine with the serious institutional legitimacy it needs to survive the scandal. Miranda is not consulted. Miranda is, to put it mildly, not pleased.

The setup is efficient and smart. Bringing Andy back to Runway as Miranda’s professional equal rather than her assistant completely changes the power dynamic between them, and McKenna understands that this shift is where the sequel’s dramatic interest lives.

The original film’s tension was fundamentally about hierarchy: Andy at the bottom, Miranda at the top, the comedy and the cruelty generated by the distance between them. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a film about what happens when that hierarchy flattens, when the assistant becomes a colleague, when the gorgon has to negotiate with someone she cannot simply dismiss.

Meryl Streep Has Gotten Even Better at Being Miranda Priestly

This should not be physically possible, but here we are. Meryl Streep’s Miranda in the original film was one of the great comic-terrifying performances of the 2000s, a masterclass in saying nothing and meaning everything, in using silence and stillness as instruments of maximum psychological damage. The 2026 version is something different and something more. The twenty years of living inside this character, plus the twenty years of real-world change to the institutions Miranda represents, have given Streep an entirely new emotional register to work with.

This Miranda is not simply the icy gorgon of the original, secure in her position and effortlessly devastating to anyone who questions her authority. This is a woman who knows her world is ending and has decided not to go quietly. No longer just your stock dragon-lady boss, the 2026 Miranda is an old-school pro with magazines in her blood, her focus sharper than ever.

Streep plays Miranda’s vulnerability, which is considerable and genuine, without ever abandoning the character’s fundamental armor. The moments where Miranda privately contemplates walking away rather than bending to a system she no longer recognizes are the film’s most quietly devastating passages, and they belong entirely to Streep’s ability to communicate interior complexity without telegraphing it.

The costuming assists enormously. Molly Rogers, taking over from Patricia Field, has dressed Miranda in ways that Field never quite attempted. The old Miranda wouldn’t have worn a tassel-bedecked toreador jacket rendered in the soft olive and aqua tones of a weathered Venetian palazzo.

The clothes tell a story about a woman who has stopped performing authority for other people and started dressing for herself, and that story runs in parallel to the film’s dramatic arc in ways that the best costume design always does. Miranda’s wardrobe in The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not a power display. It is a self-portrait by someone who has finally stopped caring whether you approve.

The hushed, lacerating economy of Streep’s line readings is as precise as ever. She compacts layers of passive-aggressive meaning into a single arched brow, a tight half-smile, a pause of calibrated duration. When Miranda delivers the news that she scarcely remembers Andy from her previous employment, it lands as both the cruelest possible thing she could say and, possibly, the truth. Streep keeps both readings available simultaneously throughout the film, which is the technical achievement that separates a performance of this quality from a merely excellent one.

What Happened to Emily, Nigel, and Everyone Else

Emily Blunt is no longer at Runway. She has spent the intervening twenty years clawing her way into the position she always wanted, and she is now a Dior executive, polished and powerful and still magnificently withering about almost everything.

Her scenes with Hathaway and Tucci are the film’s most purely pleasurable stretches, the three of them having clearly not lost a step of the specific chemistry that made the original ensemble so enjoyable. Blunt’s Emily has earned her authority and wears it with the specific combination of satisfaction and continued grievance that the character has always possessed, and McKenna writes her some of the film’s sharpest lines.

Stanley Tucci’s Nigel has also ascended, serving as Miranda’s most trusted lieutenant in Runway’s institutional crisis, and Tucci brings to the role the same quality he always has: genuine warmth underneath the comic acidity, affection for Miranda that exceeds any rational justification, and the ability to make a single sardonic observation feel like a complete character study. The scene between Tucci and Hathaway where they take stock of where they each ended up is the film’s most emotionally honest passage, two people who did not know they would miss each other realizing simultaneously that they did.

Kenneth Branagh is wasted as Miranda’s current husband, a gentle and apparently devoted man whose primary function in the narrative is to confirm that Miranda’s emotional life has improved since her multiple divorces of the original film. Twenty years ago, he was filing for divorce; today he’s a dedicated wife guy. Some things do get better. Branagh makes what he can of the role, which is not very much, and his relatively brief screentime represents the film’s most conspicuous instance of a casting decision that the screenplay never justifies.

Tracie Thoms returns as Lily, Andy’s friend from the original, and her scenes ground the film’s more frothily satirical passages in something approaching genuine emotional stakes. The film knows to use her sparingly.

Justin Theroux and the AI Villain Problem

The new characters in The Devil Wears Prada 2 are where the film’s ambitions most visibly exceed its execution. Justin Theroux plays Benji Barnes, a tech billionaire circling Runway with acquisition intent and a vision for its AI-assisted future that represents everything Miranda holds in contempt. Benji, for his part, becomes the film’s mouthpiece for inevitability. Change, he argues, is constant: empires fall, industries evolve, and AI is not a threat but the next logical step. Theroux plays him with a Silicon Valley affect of blandly confident disruption that is recognizable and occasionally funny.

The problem is that Benji is a thesis statement rather than a person. He exists to articulate the film’s antagonist position with enough surface charm to avoid being a cartoon, and Theroux does that competently. But the character’s resemblance to a composite sketch of several real tech figures, along with a noted physical similarity to a certain prominent billionaire that the film appears to be at least partially aware of, makes him feel like satire that has not decided how sharp it wants to be.

The stakes aren’t as high for any individual character as they are for Runway itself, as the film’s glitzily Milan-set third act ultimately comes down to a battle for the magazine’s soul between a few billionaires with varying degrees of moral virtue. This is the film’s structural limitation stated plainly. When your climax is a negotiation between wealthy people over who gets to control an institution, the emotional stakes of that negotiation depend entirely on how much you care about the institution.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 works to make you care about Runway as a repository of taste and craft and the human capacity for beauty in an increasingly algorithm-driven world. It is more successful at this than it has any right to be, largely because Streep makes you feel Miranda’s investment in the magazine as something close to personal devastation.

Lucy Liu as the elusive billionaire Sasha Barnes is genuinely underused. She arrives late, makes a significant impression in limited screentime, and disappears before the film has properly deployed what she might have offered. This is the sequel’s most disappointing casting choice, not because Liu does poor work but because you can see in every scene she is in what a more prominent role might have given the film in its final act.

Andy Sachs, Twenty Years Later

Anne Hathaway has the most complicated job in The Devil Wears Prada 2. The original film’s Andy worked precisely because she was slightly overwhelmed by everything around her, because the audience could track her disorientation and use it as an entry point into the world the film was depicting. A forty-year-old Andy who is overwhelmed by Runway would be a different kind of problem from a twenty-two-year-old Andy who is overwhelmed by Runway. McKenna solves this by giving the older Andy a different kind of vulnerability: not naivety but the specific wound of a person who built exactly the career she wanted and then watched it dismantled by forces she could not control.

Even though Andy is positioned as the movie’s true champion of journalism, as Hathaway plays her, she’s still too dreamily wide-eyed to be believable. This is a fair criticism and not entirely the actress’s fault. McKenna’s screenplay occasionally writes Andy as slightly younger than Hathaway’s grounded screen presence suggests, and the gap between the character as written and the character as performed creates a faint inconsistency that the film never quite resolves. Hathaway is more interesting when Andy is angry than when she is idealistic, and the scene where she finally confronts the specific futility of her journalistic crusade with something more honest than righteous indignation is the performance’s best moment.

The romantic subplot with Patrick Brammall, playing an Australian contractor named Douglas, is the film’s weakest element. Brammall is a gifted comic actor whose work in Colin From Accounts demonstrated what he is capable of when a script gives him something to work with. This script gives him very little, and the romance between Andy and Douglas resolves along lines so predictable that it feels less like a narrative choice and more like an obligation the film was contractually required to fulfill. The original film’s romantic throughline worked because it was entangled with Andy’s professional identity crisis. This one exists in a separate compartment that the movie keeps sealed from everything more interesting happening around it.

The AI Angle and What the Film Is Actually Saying

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the rare studio film that takes a genuinely position on the AI and journalism crisis rather than simply using it as backdrop. Where it excels is in its depiction of a dying journalism landscape, where clicks are prioritized over everything and complicated work is shopped out to AI.

The film’s argument, stated directly in Andy’s award speech and developed throughout the film’s second act, is that the specific human capacity for taste, for judgment, for understanding why something is beautiful rather than simply identifying that an audience has previously engaged with similar content, is irreplaceable and worth fighting for. This is also Miranda’s argument, articulated in her own considerably less democratic vocabulary, and the film is smart to recognize that these two characters, who disagree about almost everything, are on the same side of the question that actually matters.

What the film does well is resist turning this into a simple good-versus-evil binary. Even Miranda, the high priestess of taste, is shown wavering, at one point contemplating walking away rather than bending to a system she doesn’t recognize. The film’s best moments on this theme are the quiet ones rather than the declarative ones.

Andy shouting “Journalism still matters!” is a crowd-pleaser and a reasonable crowd-pleaser, but the scene where Miranda sits alone with a layout that an AI has generated and studies it with an expression of genuine grief is the more sophisticated statement. The machine has produced something technically correct and entirely soulless, and what Streep communicates in that silence is not contempt but something closer to mourning.

The eventual resolution, Runway finding a ‘right’ buyer who allows creative autonomy, feels a little too convenient for a film that begins in such a morally ambiguous space. This is the honest assessment. The Devil Wears Prada 2 earns its melancholy setup and then retreats from the conclusions that setup implies. A film that opens by acknowledging that print journalism is being dismantled by forces that cannot be negotiated with should probably not resolve with a billionaire who happens to have good values.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 knows this, at some level. The slight embarrassment with which the resolution is handled suggests McKenna wrote it with one eye closed. It is the wrong ending for the right movie, and the gap between what The Devil Wears Prada 2 could have been and what it settles for is exactly the size of one convenient rescue billionaire.

The Visual Controversy and What It Actually Looks Like

The trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 generated a specific strand of online criticism before anyone had seen the film: the flat, grayish, low-contrast visual presentation that has become associated with the “Netflix look” and with contemporary digital production more broadly. Though DP Florian Ballhaus returns here, the grayish veil cast over scene after scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2 tidily demonstrates how significantly standards of studio-movie lighting have shifted in recent years: Miranda Priestly herself would certainly have some words on this front.

This criticism has merit and the film itself acknowledges as much by the quality of its exceptions. When The Devil Wears Prada 2 wants to look extraordinary, in the Milan sequences, in the major Runway fashion presentations, in the scenes where costume and setting are doing the film’s most important emotional work, it does.

The problem is that too much of the film surrounding those sequences looks like it was lit for maximum streaming compatibility rather than for the theatrical presentation that the story’s scale demands. A film about the irreplaceable value of human taste and craft deserves to look like someone made specific, uncompromising visual choices throughout. The Devil Wears Prada 2 looks like those choices were made for about forty percent of its running time.

Molly Rogers’ costumes are the consistent visual triumph. The clothes in this film are better than in the original, a sentence that required some courage to write given how iconic Patricia Field’s work on the 2006 film remains. Rogers dresses Miranda as a woman who has stopped performing for an audience and started performing for herself. She dresses Emily as a woman who has fully arrived at the version of herself she always intended to become. She dresses Andy in the specific visual language of someone who learned to care about clothes and then unlearned the anxiety about caring, which is a more sophisticated sartorial statement than most films attempt.

The Lady Gaga Song, the Controversy, and a Few Other Things Worth Noting

“Runway,” the original song performed by Lady Gaga and Doechii over the film’s second trailer, is a house pop track with ambitions slightly larger than its execution and a hook that stays with you regardless of whether you want it to. It is better than most songs written for movie trailers and considerably better than most songs written for fashion-adjacent movie trailers, which is a genre with a mixed track record. Whether it will have an independent life beyond the film’s promotional campaign is the question its commercial reception will answer.

The Jin Chao character controversy, which preceded the film’s release and centered on the name of Andy’s Asian assistant, is addressed by the film itself in a way that suggests someone in the production was aware of the problem and attempted a course correction that may or may not satisfy viewers who encountered the criticism before seeing the movie. This is as much as can be said here without detailed plot spoilers.

B.J. Novak as Jay Ravitz, Irv’s son who assumes corporate control after his father’s accident, is the film’s most surprising and most effective new character. Novak plays him as neither a straightforward villain nor a straightforward ally, a person whose understanding of what Runway represents is both genuine and fundamentally incompatible with Miranda’s, and whose comfort with the tech-billionaire world he inhabits is not cynical but sincere. He is more interesting than Theroux’s Benji in every scene they share, which is a small irony given that Theroux has significantly more screentime.

Who Should See The Devil Wears Prada 2

If you loved The Devil Wears Prada and have been waiting twenty years for this: go. Hard to imagine anyone who’s a fan of the first film being disappointed with The Devil Wears Prada 2. It’s funny, charming, and filled with genuinely heartwarming payoffs. The chemistry between Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci is intact. The clothes are magnificent. Miranda Priestly has been given a story worthy of her, and Streep delivers a performance that is at minimum the equal of her original work and in some respects its superior. The sequel earns its existence by finding genuine new dramatic territory rather than simply rerunning the original’s greatest hits.

If you are skeptical of sequels, late sequels especially, and want to know whether this one justifies the long wait: conditionally. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a better film than its marketing suggested and a more serious film than its genre classification implies.

The AI-and-journalism theme is handled with more intelligence than most studio films bring to any topical subject, and the film’s willingness to mourn the world it is depicting, to acknowledge that the institutions it loves are genuinely dying rather than temporarily imperiled, gives it an emotional weight that the original never attempted. The ending retreats from the full weight of what the film has been building, and the romantic subplot is a distraction the film cannot afford. But Streep alone is worth the price of admission.

If you have not seen the original: watch the original first. The Devil Wears Prada 2 assumes familiarity with all four central characters and their histories, and the emotional payoffs of their reunion depend entirely on that context. The 2006 film holds up completely, which is the highest compliment you can pay a twenty-year-old studio comedy.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 knows it’s chronicling the end of an era, kind of like The Leopard, but for fashion magazines. That is both the most accurate description of what The Devil Wears Prada 2 is doing and the best argument for why it is worth seeing. Movies that know what they are about are rarer than they should be. This one knows, most of the time, and the parts where it doesn’t quite have the courage of its own convictions are more forgivable than they might otherwise be for exactly that reason.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in theaters now via 20th Century Studios.