Twenty Years Later, Miranda Priestly Returns to Save Print Media, Which Tells You Exactly How the Movie Ends

The Devil Wears Prada 2 knows exactly what it is, and so do the six hundred and eighty eight million dollars it made. Two decades on, Andy Sachs is a respected New York reporter whose entire newsroom gets laid off by text message during an awards gala, while Miranda Priestly is under fire for a puff piece about a brand that turned out to use sweatshop labor. To fix Runway's credibility, Irv Ravitz hires Andy as features editor without Miranda's blessing, and the claws come back out. It is a nostalgia machine with immaculate tailoring.

The cast is why it works at all. Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Tucci slip back into these people like a favorite coat, joined by Justin Theroux, Lucy Liu and Kenneth Branagh, and for long stretches you are happy just to watch them share a frame. Blunt in particular is a delight. The reviews landed generally positive but mixed, and one critic nailed the flaw: the film gives you a lot to look at, but it is flat champagne. Beautiful, bubbly on the surface, a little airless underneath.

So Sally will not sneer at a fun, handsome, genuinely enjoyable crowd-pleaser, especially one that opened to two hundred and thirty three million dollars worldwide and sent seventy six percent female audiences home grading it an A-minus. But a legacy sequel about saving print media in 2026 is a fantasy dressed as a comeback, and the movie is at its best when it stops pretending to have new things to say and just lets these actors be magnetic. Which, thankfully, is most of the time.

The campaign sold the reunion, the outfits and that one raised Streep eyebrow, and honestly, why wouldn't it. Nobody bought a ticket for a searing take on the collapse of journalism. They bought it for Miranda Priestly walking back into a room, and the marketing was smart enough to give the people exactly, and only, that.