'The Devil Wears Prada 2' Is True to the Orignal - Warts and All

The Devil Wears Prada 2 goes down about as comfortably as the now-classic original. Not that quality matters: the sequel took $233m worldwide in its opening weekend, an astronomical sum just short of what The Devil Wears Prada earned in its entire theatrical run back in 2006 ($326m, not adjusted for inflation). Part two nominally suffers from the same issues as part one, the only difference being a lack of rose-tinted nostalgia to bump it up a few extra points. Come 2046, The Devil Wears Prada 2 will probably be a five-star film.

The plot doesn't matter. The screenplay, by returning scribe Aileen Brosh-McKenna, is terminally busy by half. All you need to know is that the gang is back together: Anne Hathaway's Andrea Sachs must return to Runway to save Miranda Priestly's (Meryl Streep) job, with help from Emily (Emily Blunt) and Nigel (Stanley Tucci). Missing is the original's bitter satire, replaced by a much more product-placement-friendly embrace of the industry it wants so badly to deconstruct. Still, there's a surprisingly jaunty momentum to the proceedings here that is lacking in too many similar legacy sequels.

Whereas the original was slickly simplistic – Andrea enters the fashion world as an outsider and leaves as slightly less of one, perhaps with nicer coats – the sequel trips over itself trying to repeat set pieces from the first movie (time to call this trend, legacy sequels) while inserting a bunch of corporate espionage nonsense that comes perilously close to unravelling the entire piece. In its most toe-curling moment of indulgence, the picture ties itself in a knot to justify another scene of Nigel procuring designer duds for a woefully underdressed Andrea. The reason for this, wait for it, is because Andrea threw away her nice clothes (didn't even sell them!) because when she became a "serious journalist," she found that "Gucci has no place in the newsroom." Perhaps this harrowing misapproximation of workplace politics is why Andrea finds herself jobless and near-broke at the top of part two.

Anyway, considering all of this, it's a minor miracle that Prada 2 works as well as it does. And it does really work, albeit in a sort of anodyne USA-Network-on-a-Sunday-afternoon way. But that's also why the first has endured all these years. Frankel's direction is particularly strong, maintaining a consistency with the original while elevating itself in the style we'd expect from a 2026 wish-fulfillment narrative. He's always been able to elicit surprising performances from his casts, something in evidence here, but Prada 2 is also one of the best shot and lit studio comedies in a while. Frankel's return is probably the smartest move here; one senses anyone else in the director's chair would've turned in an inferior approximation.

The picture moves briskly across its two-hour length, never dragging, even in the admittedly baroque later stages of the melodrama. The original's last-second business-merger twist worked despite itself, including that tonally at-odds, Soderberghian reveal montage, but part two is not so lucky. The most, perhaps the only, unavoidable problem with the picture is its treatment of Blunt's character, who veritably stole the original. Here she's consigned to a thin villainous role (opposite a very good, momentarily unrecognizable Justin Theroux) that's lacking any of the character's biting wit from the original. (The part is poorly written, but Blunt seems, for once in her career, lost, like she's forgotten what made the character likeable.) The same can be said on a much smaller scale of Streep's Priestly, who here is de-fanged to the point of obsequiousness, largely playing in that mode from the first when she waxes poetic about the cost of work on her marriage. Despite its sweatiness, a similar monologue near the end of this installment works just about as well. When it's this pleasant to be back in the company of old friends, why should we complain if they finally play nice?

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in cinemas nationwide.

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on May 4, 2026, where it first appeared in the Entertainment section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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This story was originally published May 4, 2026 at 12:00 PM.