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THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 (2026) Movie Review: Miranda Priestly Returns and She's More Terrifying Than Ever
Opening Scene
There are sequels that feel like cash grabs, and then there are sequels that feel like they were always meant to exist. The Devil Wears Prada 2, directed once again by David Frankel and written by the returning Aline Brosh McKenna, falls gloriously into the second category. Twenty years after Miranda Priestly first whispered her way into cinematic infamy, Meryl Streep is back in that silver wig, and she has not lost a single razor-sharp edge. Anne Hathaway returns as Andy Sachs, now a fully realised journalist navigating a media world in freefall, and the chemistry between these two women crackles with a new kind of tension — one that feels less like a power struggle and more like a reckoning. Released in cinemas on May 1, 2026, through 20th Century Studios, this is a film that dares to be more than nostalgia. It asks something harder: what does ambition look like when the world that shaped it is collapsing? From the very first frame, you feel the answer pressing against your chest.
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Plot Summary
The Devil Wears Prada 2 picks up approximately twenty years after the events of the first film. Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has built herself a formidable career in journalism. She runs a respected digital publication, has carved out a life on her own terms, and has almost managed to forget the year she spent surviving Miranda Priestly. Almost.
Miranda herself (Meryl Streep) is navigating a landscape that has turned against everything she built. Runway magazine, once the apex of fashion authority, is haemorrhaging readers, advertising dollars, and relevance. The print industry is dying. Miranda, however, refuses to die with it. She is in the middle of a sweeping reinvention, restructuring the magazine's entire business model, cutting jobs with the cold efficiency we remember from the first film — and she needs Andy.
Not in the same way as before. This time Miranda needs Andy's journalistic credibility and her digital expertise to help broker a public-facing transition that can save Runway's legacy. Andy, understandably, is reluctant. But old wounds, old fascinations, and old debts have a way of pulling people back into each other's orbit.
New additions to the cast include Justin Theroux, Lucy Liu, and a deliciously antagonistic Kenneth Branagh, all orbiting Miranda's world like satellites that know they could be ejected at any moment. Emily Blunt returns as Emily, now a powerful style director navigating her own complicated loyalty to Miranda. Stanley Tucci's Nigel is back too, older and wiser and heartbreaking in ways the first film only hinted at.
The plot weaves together the personal and the professional with surprising sophistication. There are surprise cameos — several of them genuinely shocking — that reward longtime fans without alienating newcomers. And beneath the glittering fashion world, the film tells a story about women who built everything the world told them to build, and now must figure out what it means when that world changes the rules.
Director's Style & Cinematic Elements
David Frankel brings a maturity to The Devil Wears Prada 2 that the original, for all its pleasures, didn't quite reach. The first film was glossy and propulsive, a runway sprint through a fantasy version of New York's fashion elite. This sequel moves with a different rhythm — slower in its quietest moments, more willing to let a scene breathe, more comfortable sitting with discomfort.
The production design is extraordinary. The Runway offices have been reimagined to reflect what several crew members have described as the "demise of print magazines" — there is more glass, more open space, more emptiness in places that were once crammed with the churn of an empire at full tilt. The contrast between the original's overstuffed, perfumed chaos and this film's cooler, more clinical aesthetic is deeply intentional and deeply affecting. Costume designer Patricia Field returns and delivers another masterclass: Miranda's wardrobe has evolved in ways that tell their own story about power and vulnerability, while Andy's clothes speak to a woman who has finally developed her own voice.
Emmanuel Lubezki was not involved, but the cinematography by the film's director of photography captures Paris and New York with a twilight melancholy that feels exactly right for a story about legacy and loss. Frankel understands that the sequel's emotional engine is not the comedy of office politics but the tragedy of watching an icon confront her own obsolescence — and choose, characteristically, to fight.
For more on Rotten Tomatoes scores and critical consensus, see The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Themes & Deeper Meaning
At its core, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a film about what happens to ambition when it outlasts the world that created it. Miranda Priestly was always a mirror: in the original film, she reflected back at Andy — and at us — our own complicated hunger for success, for approval, for belonging. In this sequel, that mirror has cracked.
The film is explicitly engaged with the collapse of print media and the chaos of the digital transition, but these are really just the surface through which deeper themes emerge. What does a woman do when the institution she gave her entire self to begins to disintegrate? What does loyalty mean between people who have never quite been honest about what they mean to each other? What does success cost, and who pays that cost when the invoice finally arrives?
There is a remarkable scene late in the film in which Miranda sits alone in the nearly empty Runway offices, and for just a moment, the mask slips. Streep doesn't need dialogue. She doesn't need movement. She needs only to be in the space, and the weight of twenty years presses down on the screen with a force that will leave you breathless.
The film is also, unexpectedly, a meditation on female mentorship — its toxicity, its necessity, and the strange love that can grow between two women who would never use that word about each other. It does not sentimentalise this relationship. It honours it by showing all of its damage.
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Acting Performances
Meryl Streep is, simply put, astonishing. She does something in this film that she could not have done twenty years ago: she plays vulnerability beneath armour with such precision that you never quite know when the armour ends and the vulnerability begins. Miranda in 2026 is still terrifying, still magnificent, but she is also, for the first time, legible as a human being. The shift is almost imperceptible, which is what makes it so devastating.
Anne Hathaway matches her scene for scene. Andy Sachs is no longer the ingénue finding her footing; she is a grown woman who knows exactly who she is and what she has sacrificed to become that person. The scenes between Hathaway and Streep have a new electricity — the electricity of equals who refuse to admit it.
Emily Blunt is a revelation. Emily's arc in this film is quietly one of its most complex, and Blunt plays it with a bone-dry precision that manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking. Stanley Tucci's Nigel, meanwhile, carries years of quiet grief in every look, every pause.
"Well, look what TJ Maxx dragged in." — Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada 2
Kenneth Branagh is tremendous fun as the antagonist, and Lucy Liu brings an icy intelligence to her role that the film desperately needed.
Strengths
The Devil Wears Prada 2 earns its existence. That alone puts it ahead of most legacy sequels, which tend to either slavishly replicate their predecessors or wildly overcorrect away from what made them work. This film does something harder: it trusts the audience to have grown up alongside its characters, and it meets them where they are.
The screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna is sharp and emotionally honest. There are lines in this film — quiet ones, not the show-stopping zingers you might expect — that will stay with you long after the credits roll. The film respects its audience's intelligence. It doesn't spell things out. It trusts the silences.
The pacing is significantly better than most fashion-world dramas, which tend to either rush or dawdle. Frankel keeps things moving with elegant efficiency, and the film's 118-minute runtime feels perfectly calibrated — long enough to breathe, tight enough to sing.
The surprise cameos are genuinely surprising. The production design is extraordinary. And the final Paris sequence, which I will not spoil, is the kind of cinema that justifies the entire enterprise: emotional, visually stunning, and rooted entirely in character rather than spectacle.
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Areas for Improvement
For all its accomplishments, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not a perfect film. The first act leans slightly too hard on the nostalgia of reunion — the pleasure of seeing these characters again sometimes crowds out the room needed for the new story to establish its own footing. There is a slightly rushed quality to the early scenes as the film works to reintroduce its ensemble while also setting up new dynamics and new characters.
Kenneth Branagh's antagonist, while superbly played, is perhaps too cartoonishly sinister in his motivations. The first film benefited enormously from the complexity of its villain — Miranda was terrifying precisely because she was never quite a villain. Branagh's character doesn't quite achieve that moral complexity.
Some of the media-industry satire, while pointed, occasionally tips into caricature. Critics who found the film without a clear thesis have a point: the movie sometimes seems uncertain whether it wants to be a sharp indictment of the fashion industry's digital pivot or a warm, nostalgic farewell to an era. It mostly manages to be both, but the seams occasionally show.
Comparative Analysis
The Devil Wears Prada 2 invites comparison to several films in the legacy sequel canon. The most obvious parallel is Top Gun: Maverick (2022), the gold standard for sequels that honour their predecessors while pushing their characters into genuinely new emotional territory. The Devil Wears Prada 2 achieves something similar — it is not merely a revisitation but an evolution, and like Maverick, it earns its emotional payoff by refusing to take the easy route.
It also deserves comparison to Legally Blonde (2001) and Working Girl (1988) — films about women who refuse to let powerful institutions define their worth. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, in many ways, the third act of that story: what happens after you've proved yourself, after you've climbed the ladder, after the ladder turns out to be leaning against a burning building.
Fans of the original will also find echoes of The Post (2017) in this film's engagement with the collapse of print journalism. It handles that material with more warmth and less po-faced solemnity, but the grief is real.
For those who want to revisit the canon: The Devil Wears Prada (2006) on Amazon | Working Girl on Amazon
Target Audience
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, at its heart, a film for grown women who have spent twenty years in the workforce and know exactly what it costs. It will resonate most deeply with anyone who has ever had to choose between ambition and integrity, between loyalty to an institution and loyalty to themselves.
That said, the film is accessible far beyond that core audience. Fashion lovers will adore the wardrobe and the world. Film lovers will appreciate the craft. Anyone who loved the original will find enormous pleasure in returning to these characters — and in discovering how much richer they have become with time.
Young professionals at the beginning of their careers will see their possible futures reflected in Andy and Emily and Miranda. And anyone who has ever worked for someone both brilliant and terrifying will recognise something true in the film's complicated emotional landscape.
This is a film for anyone who has ever been both awed by power and quietly horrified by what it demands.
Personal Impact
I went into The Devil Wears Prada 2 expecting to enjoy it the way you enjoy a reunion tour: with pleasure and mild nostalgia and the occasional wince at the passage of time. I did not expect to be moved. I did not expect to sit in the darkness after the film ended and feel something that I can only describe as grief — not for the characters, but for the version of myself that watched the original and didn't yet understand what it was really saying.
The first film was about ambition. This sequel is about consequences. And consequences, it turns out, are where the real emotional weight lives. Meryl Streep in that empty office. Anne Hathaway in Paris, her face doing things that words cannot touch. The line that echoes the original in a way I will not spoil, deployed at exactly the right moment. These are images that will stay with me.
This is a sequel that justifies its own existence — not just commercially, but artistically. That is rarer than it should be.
Conclusion
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a worthy, beautifully crafted sequel that finds genuine new things to say about its characters and their world. It earns a 77% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 88% audience score, and both of those numbers feel right — this is a film that satisfies without overwhelming, that delivers on its promises while quietly exceeding them.
It is currently playing in cinemas worldwide through 20th Century Studios. If you loved the original, go. If you never saw it, go watch the original first, then go. If you're looking for a film that will make you think about ambition and legacy and what women are asked to sacrifice for the institutions they build — go, and bring someone who matters to you.
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❓ FAQs: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
1. Is The Devil Wears Prada 2 worth watching? Absolutely. It's one of the best legacy sequels in recent memory — emotionally honest, superbly acted, and richer than the original in almost every way. The 88% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes reflects genuine viewer enthusiasm.
2. Where can I watch The Devil Wears Prada 2? As of May 2026, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is playing exclusively in cinemas worldwide through 20th Century Studios (Disney). A streaming release has not yet been confirmed, but it is likely to arrive on Disney+ in the coming months.
3. Do I need to watch the first film first? While the sequel does enough to orient new viewers, watching the original The Devil Wears Prada (2006) will significantly deepen your appreciation of the characters, their history, and the emotional payoffs the sequel delivers.
4. Is The Devil Wears Prada 2 based on a true story? No. Both films are fictional, though they draw heavily on the real-world fashion industry and, in the sequel, the collapse of print media. The character of Miranda Priestly is widely believed to have been partly inspired by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
5. Does The Devil Wears Prada 2 have a happy ending? That depends on your definition of happy. The film ends on a note of earned melancholy and tentative hope — true to the characters rather than falsely optimistic.
6. How long is The Devil Wears Prada 2? Approximately 118 minutes.
7. Is Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada 2? Yes. Emily Blunt returns as Emily Charlton, and her performance is one of the film's finest.
8. What is the Rotten Tomatoes score for The Devil Wears Prada 2? As of May 2026: 77% critics, 88% audience score — both strong numbers for a sequel in this genre.
9. Who directed The Devil Wears Prada 2? David Frankel, who directed the original 2006 film, returns to direct the sequel.
10. Is The Devil Wears Prada 2 better than the original? Most critics say it's different rather than strictly better — more emotionally mature, but without quite the same breezy energy of the first film. As a whole, the two films together make a richer, more complete story than either does alone.
About the Director: David Frankel
David Frankel is an American film and television director best known for The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Marley & Me (2008), and Hope Springs (2012). He began his career directing episodes of HBO's Sex and the City, and has consistently shown a talent for finding genuine emotional depth within commercial, mainstream entertainment. His collaboration with Meryl Streep across two Prada films represents one of the more fruitful director-actor partnerships in contemporary Hollywood.
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