David Frankel (2026)

In the 2010 edition of David Thomson’s revered The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, a recurring theme of his entry for Meryl Streep is the gap between the esteem and the affection in which she’s held.  Thomson notes at an early point that ‘The distinguished are sometimes those the public does not love’, then goes on to list nearly every one of Streep’s films to date, except The Devil Wears Prada (2006).  ‘Finding Herself’, a piece on Streep by Molly Haskell in the March-April 2008 issue of Film Comment[1] is more acute.  The article appeared shortly before Mamma Mia! hit cinemas but Haskell recognises that David Frankel’s fashionista comedy two years earlier had already made a difference to its star’s image.  The opening sentence of ‘Finding Herself’ is ‘After years of respecting the work of Meryl Streep, what was it that made audiences suddenly fall in love with her in The Devil Wears Prada?’  Molly Haskell goes on to answer that question humorously and persuasively.

Twenty years on – just when it seemed Streep had almost retired from cinema (she hadn’t appeared in a film since Don’t Look Up (2021)) – she returns in The Devil Wears Prada 2.  The rest of the main cast from the first Prada – Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci – and the main contributors behind the camera, Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, are also back for more.  According to an article on the BBC news website, Streep and her co-stars agreed to do the sequel on the condition that it ‘speak to the moment’ and that ‘the storyline reflected the dramatic changes in the real-life media and magazine industry’.  This speaking-to-the-moment is the new film’s phoniest aspect.  Unlike its predecessor, it’s also very sentimental and feels interminable (though the actual difference in running time between the two films is only ten minutes).  Despite all this, Prada 2 provides a good few things to enjoy.

At the end of the first film, Andrea ‘Andy’ Sachs (Hathaway) quits her job as assistant to Miranda Priestly (Streep), the dragon-lady editor-in-chief of New York City-based fashion magazine ‘Runway’ (aka Vogue), to pursue the career that Andy really wants as a ‘serious’ journalist.  Two decades later, Andy is a highly successful feature writer at ‘Vanguard’, a hard-news organ in NYC, respected for fearless investigative journalism.  Prada 2 starts with Andy at a press awards ceremony.  Just before her name is called as the winner in her category, her phone pings – ditto the phones of her colleagues:  every member of the Vanguard editorial team has received a text informing them they’ve been laid off with immediate effect.  Andy’s acceptance speech becomes an impromptu rant on the theme that ‘journalism still f***ing matters’ and it goes viral.  At the same time, Miranda Priestly, still in charge at Runway, is under fire from Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), owner of the magazine‘s parent company, the publishing house Elias-Clarke.  Miranda failed to vet a Runway piece promoting a brand that relies on sweatshop labour – result:  terrible publicity all over social media.  Ravitz tells Miranda he’s putting on hold her appointment as Elias-Clarke’s ‘global head of content’.  To make matters worse for her, in the space of a few screen minutes Andy has a new job – back at Runway as features editor, without Miranda’s knowledge or consent.

Skewering an impoverished culture where the bottom line is all that counts, David Frankel and Aline Brosh McKenna make heavy weather of conveying the media shift towards short-form journalism, clickbait, AI.  The film also tries to have things both ways.  The notoriously meticulous, gimlet-eyed Miranda of the original Prada wouldn’t have let that offending article slip through – so is she losing her edge?  Either that or her patience.  In the early stages, she’s shown as adrift in a 2020s world where Runway’s HR department constrains Miranda’s high-handed management style and politically incorrect remarks.  Yet the whole narrative tends towards giving her a happy ending – and the filmmakers can only imagine that to be her getting the big promotion, never mind that Miranda is now supposedly a misfit/anachronism.  As for Andy:  it would be easier to accept what happens at Vanguard as a tragic sign of the times if she showed the slightest regret for the journalism world that she’s lost, but she doesn’t.  (She eventually decides to write a no-punches-pulled biography of Miranda Priestly, which the latter encourages her to do.)  The ending of Prada 2 sees Andy thriving and staying on at Runway – with, courtesy of Miranda, a larger office than before.

There are many more costume changes this time around.  Thanks to the first film’s huge success, international fashion houses were clearly queuing up for coverage on the clothes racks and catwalks of Prada 2:  costumer Molly Rogers has curated outfits from Armani, Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior, Tom Ford, Paco Rabanne, Schiaparelli, Valentino, Versace ….   There’s a cast-of-thousands in as-themselves cameos, among whom I’d both heard of and recognised only Naomi Campbell and Donatella Versace (I would have recognised Rory McIlroy if I’d spotted him).  Lady Gaga is a rather different matter:  she is herself, headlining the Runway gala at Milan Fashion Week, but the script invents a bit of supposed bad blood between her and Miranda, and Lady Gaga’s gala number does give proceedings a lift.  The opulence and A-list overload on display are amusing enough, but they make it hard for your heart to bleed for the characters in the story.  The sad feelings generated by the film relate not to decaying media culture but to its two lead actresses – though for rather different reasons.

Anne Hathaway was riding very high in the early 2010s.  After winning an Oscar for performing a single number in Les Misérables (2012), she chose some films that didn’t fare well, critically or commercially, and her stock has fallen in recent years.  As it happens, Prada 2 arrives on the screen just a few weeks after David Lowery’s Mother Mary, in which Hathaway has her most remarked-on role in some time (though the reviews have been mixed and the film doesn’t appear to be making money).  You can’t help wondering if Hathaway would have signed up for a Prada sequel if her career had progressed according to plan during the last decade.  She has the most difficult of Prada 2’s main roles – Andy was more plausibly conflicted in the first film than she is here – but Hathaway is very competent.  Even so, there’s an overeagerness not only in the character but also in the woman playing her.  This can be a bit uncomfortable to watch.

The sadness with Meryl Streep comes simply from wondering, especially after that five-year hiatus, if this will be her last cinema appearance (she is voicing Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, scheduled for release next year).  Prada 2’s Miranda is a confused character compared with before.  In one sense, she’s a reversal of who she was in the first Prada.  There, Miranda was exposed (briefly) as vulnerable only in her private life.  This time, she’s in a happy second marriage, to a musician (Kenneth Branagh, with next to nothing to do), and professionally vulnerable instead.  It’s a bit disorienting at the start to see Miranda on the receiving end of a boss’s ire – and a relief when, on their first office (re)encounter, she cuts Andy dead, turns to her loyal adjutant Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) and asks, sotto voce but scathing, ‘Who is this person?’

As Molly Haskell pointed out in the Film Comment profile, Miranda ‘is a role that Streep could do in her sleep’.  Her reputation for mimicry means there are times in Prada 2 when Meryl Streep seems, weirdly, to be imitating Meryl Streep in the first film.  She might as well, though, especially when this new Miranda doesn’t add up:  Streep is aware of the audience goodwill towards outrageous Miranda, and the other Prada principals – that plenty of fans wanted to see these characters back and enjoy them all over again.  A month away from her seventy-seventh birthday, Meryl Streep looks great.  Her breath control and vocal projection are still top-class, notably when Miranda informs Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), who is on the point of taking over Runway and firing her former boss, ‘You’re not a visionary – you’re a vendor’.

Miranda’s promotion keeps getting derailed.  Irv Ravitz, about to announce it at his seventy-fifth birthday party, suddenly drops down dead.  His mercenary son Jay (B J Novak) inherits Elias-Clarke and brings in management consultants to identify cuts, before selling Runway to Silicon Valley billionaire Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), currently in a relationship with Emily.  On her return to Runway, Andy goes up in Miranda’s estimation by securing an interview with reclusive celeb Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), also vastly wealthy and Benji’s ex-wife.  Andy now convinces Sasha to buy the whole of Elias-Clarke from Jay Ravitz, who’s happy to sell and pulls out of his deal with Benji.  Miranda is finally confirmed as Elias-Clarke’s head of global brand – for what that’s worth.  She has already acknowledged to Andy that ‘Elias-Clarke is just the last piece of wood floating next to the Titanic’ (digital media is the iceberg).  But ‘there’s still room on the raft’ for Miranda and Andy, at least.  As in the previous film, they join forces to ensure that everything comes good for them both.  When Miranda finally confides in Andy that she’s grateful for ‘a couple more years’ because ‘boy, I love working.  I really do, I just love it’, the change in Meryl Streep’s voice leaves no doubt that it’s she, rather than Miranda Priestly, who’s saying and feeling those words.  Which makes the audience – this member of it anyway – feel grateful, too.

All roads led to Paris in the first Prada; this time, it’s Milan that’s the venue for resolving the plot and showcasing the clothes.  Even though he’s coasting here, it’s nice to see Stanley Tucci more comfortable at this Italian summit than he was in Conclave (2024).  I wouldn’t have guessed from the 2006 film that Emily Blunt would enjoy more sustained success than Anne Hathaway in the twenty years to follow, but Blunt has chosen well and built up a strong body of work.  It comes as a surprise, too, that her Prada namesake turns up in this sequel as a senior Dior executive, but the ascent of Emily Charlton, as desperately self-assertive as ever, makes a kind of comic sense.  It seems a bit much when she also starts shaping up as the film’s arch villain, but Blunt is very coherent:  you never forget that Emily, though endlessly bossy, is doomed to failure.  The Milan episode goes on much too long; so does a succession of tying-things-up exchanges between pairs of the main quartet once the action returns to New York.  But the lunchtime reconciliation of vindicated Andy and vanquished Emily is a high point.

Even though Andy’s personal life is more attenuated than in the first film, it’s a real plus that her new man, Peter, is played by Patrick Brammall, best known for the very engaging Australian TV comedy Colin from Accounts.  (He and his wife, Harriet Dyer, created and co-star in Colin from Accounts, and take turns writing the scripts.)  Brammall as Peter is witty and charming.  What’s more, he’s such a different type – physically and temperamentally – from the rest of the cast that his presence is refreshing.  In The Devil Wears Prada 2’s relentlessly glossy milieu, Patrick Brammall seems like a visitor from another planet – that’s to say, from a real world.

6 May 2026

[1] https://www.filmcomment.com/article/finding-herself-the-prime-of-meryl-streep/