Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway on the set of "The Devil Wears Prada 2" in Hudson Yards on July 29, 2025, in New York City.
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The Devil Wears Prada 2 seemed like it would be a frothy escape to go along with my popcorn bucket and soda, but the director David Frankel’s star-studded drama also had something else in store that I didn’t necessarily anticipate: It’s another sigh-inducing reminder that the media world the original film mythologized doesn’t look anything like that glossy on-screen version anymore.
The first film came out during a time when “legacy media” and “dream job” didn’t look incongruous in the same sentence, while the sequel is a dramedy bolted onto an at-times dispiriting tale about the contemporary media landscape.
I caught a screening the day before the 2026 Met Gala, just the sort of A-list spectacle that Meryl Streep’s Miranda would have orchestrated coverage of from her corner office back in the day — back when the going was still good for print magazines as Graydon Carter’s recent memoir so breezily put it.
A time when most journalists didn’t need reliable side hustles or Substacks to fall back on. The industry, the profession that I’ve watched inexorably, has contracted over the last 20 years.
Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, Meryl Streep, and Emily Blunt attend the world premiere of "The Devil Wears Prada 2" in New York City on April 20, 2026.
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Through its opening weekend, The Devil Wears Prada 2 managed to pull in $77 million domestically and $233.6 million worldwide. Not bad for a movie anchored in large part around a fictional magazine called Runway that’s been gutted by commercial imperatives into a metrics-obsessed shell of its former self — not to mention increasingly at the mercy of algorithms and social media discourse.
This is a magazine, mind you, that’s supposedly made a complete transition to digital yet can somehow still afford to jet writers off to Milan and dress a newly hired features editor in head-to-toe designer threads courtesy of Stanley Tucci’s Nigel. Even here, though, the indignities still ring true. Writers chase clicks, advertorials are given more consideration than meaningful stories, and management consultants cut to the bone.
Soon enough, a movie that aims to crowd-please is wagging its finger at what happens to journalism when billionaires and the attention economy extract their due. All of which is to say: The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels as much like an unwitting elegy for journalism’s print-era glamor as it is the continuation of a beloved, 20-year-old story.
The sequel kicks off with Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs at a journalism awards gala in the movie’s opening act, accepting an honor one minute and learning via text message the next that she’s been rightsized out of a job.
Cue the obligatory tears and impassioned defense of the Fourth Estate — this work matters, what are we letting happen to this bedrock of democratic society, you know the rest — and before you know it a cushy magazine job at Runway basically falls out of the sky into Andy’s lap, courtesy of the Si Newhouse-style chairman of the magazine’s parent company.
Andy’s hiring is meant to bring gravitas and serious journalistic chops to Runway to counteract the fallout of an article that spotlighted a brand connected to sweatshop labor. At one point, in a desperate bid to prove the worth of stories that are delivering poor engagement metrics (we’ve all been there), Andy confidently promises to deliver a reclusive interview subject to her editor before said interview has actually been properly nailed down — a mistake that I, too, might or might not have made in my younger years as a reporter.
Meanwhile, you know Andy has properly delivered the goods during one scene when Miranda gives a stamp of approval to a particular feature by ordering it pinned to the top of the magazine’s social media accounts.
It’s both inspiring and a little depressing to watch all this and more play out on screen — this Hollywood fantasy that a journalist can land a plumb writing gig in New York City, be given an actual budget to hire journalists to work with her, make enough to live in a spacious apartment, and work at a magazine that wins the favor of the one billionaire investor who takes a hands-off approach to the media she underwrites.
In the real world, a feel-good ending to the story is more elusive. Journalism is forced to contend with everything from aloof ownership to AI and Google Search pickpocketing an industry that didn’t exactly make a clean transition to the digital era to begin with.
The inescapable conclusion, after watching The Devil Wears Prada 2, is that the only version of the media business where serious reporting, an enviable salary, cultural influence and a benevolent billionaire all coexist is this one — this fairy tale version on the big screen, where everything just sort of works out in the end.
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