The Devil Wears Prada 2 Earns Its Existence — But Not For The Reason You Think

16 days ago by Riley Vox 5 min read

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Look, I came in ready to write the "we didn't need this sequel" piece. The Devil Wears Prada 2 had every disadvantage a 20-year-old legacy comedy sequel could have. So why did I leave the theater thinking the only honest critique left is one nobody's saying out loud?

The bar was on the floor

Here's the thing about 20-year-gap legacy comedy sequels: most of them are a slow-motion car crash you watch out of loyalty. The original The Devil Wears Prada (2006) was a perfect time capsule — Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep at career-defining moments, Emily Blunt stealing every scene she was in, Stanley Tucci holding the emotional center, David Frankel directing with the kind of light hand that lets actors cook. It didn't ask for a sequel. It didn't need one.

Compare what's happened to other legacy comedy sequels lately. Coming 2 America tried to bottle Eddie Murphy's 1988 lightning thirty-plus years later and mostly proved you can't. Bill & Ted Face the Music was charming but limited. The genre has a hazard zone — the sequel either has to add something, or it becomes a karaoke version of the thing you already loved.

So I came in skeptical. Honestly, I came in ready to dunk on it. (Alex Reed's W18 preview had the wider release picture if you want context.)

The numbers say it earned its existence

Then the numbers landed and I had to update my priors.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened to $32.5 million on Friday including $10M in Thursday previews — almost triple the 2006 original's whole-weekend $27M opening. It's tracking $75–80M for the weekend with a $90M optimistic ceiling. It's #1 across 4,150 screens. Globally it's already at $115M through Friday. (Jordan Blake's May Day clash piece called the W18 box-office context exactly right — adult-skewing fare has appetite, and Michael is holding -48% to $51M in week two, leaving plenty of oxygen.)

Here's the marker that actually matters: CinemaScore A-. That's the audience-grade poll from opening-night moviegoers, and it's the strongest single predictor of legs we've got. RT critics landed at 77% with 200+ reviews aggregated; RT audience landed at 88% — and that audience score actually beats the 2006 original's 76%.

This is not a Coming 2 America story. This is a Top Gun: Maverick / Mary Poppins Returns story. The film cleared the legacy-comedy-sequel hazard zone. I have to concede the verdict honestly: they pulled it off.

But here's the thing nobody's saying

The film cleared the bar. The bar wasn't the question.

Anna Wintour stepped down as Vogue's editor-in-chief in June 2025 — less than a year before this film hit theaters.

I'll let that sit for a second.

The Miranda Priestly satire was always — always — a satire of one specific person. One editor-in-chief commanding the entire calendar of fashion through the gravitational pull of a single print magazine. That's what made the 2006 movie work. It wasn't a satire of "fashion" abstractly. It was a satire of her, of the institution she had built around herself, of an industry where one woman's "Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking" could carry actual stakes.

That world was already eroding when production started. By the time the film actually opened, Wintour had stepped back from the editor-in-chief role itself, and Vogue was busy figuring out what it even is in the after.

The TikTok algorithm dictates trends now. Substack writers replace masthead columnists. Fashion authority is dispersed across thousands of micro-influencers, an algorithm nobody can read, and a tier of editorial voices who couldn't get past the lobby of the building Miranda Priestly ran.

So what can a Miranda Priestly satire even satirize in 2026?

Watch what the screenplay does with this problem. The RT consensus quietly notices the move: the film "expands from the original's fashion magazine to the world of print journalism at large." That's the writers admitting the same thing I'm saying. They had to scale up — to print journalism in general — because the narrow target the original satirized doesn't exist anymore. Streep still wears Miranda perfectly, the way you'd wear a finely tailored suit. The suit is immaculate. The world it was made for is gone.

Nobody in the reviews is saying this. They're arguing about whether it's funny. They're missing the question.

The critic-audience gap is small but pointed

Critics landed at 77%. Audiences landed at 88%. That's an 11-point gap — mild, not Euphoria-tier, but pointed in a specific direction.

Critics noticed the seams. Goldderby called the story "underbaked." Deadline ran with "More Is Less In Miranda Priestly's Underwhelming Return." They're picking at the same thing I'm picking at: the film knows its target moved and isn't sure where to aim.

Audiences didn't care. They wanted the texture. The Streep delivery. The Hathaway-Blunt-Tucci chemistry. Kenneth Branagh as the new fashion-industry foil. The clothes. The pacing. The feeling of being back in that world.

The most-upvoted r/movies reaction sums it up exactly: "If you liked the first, you'll like the second. If you loved the first, you'll like the second."

That's honest. That's not transcendent. That's the exact temperature of an A- CinemaScore — solid, satisfying, slightly diminished from the original, worth the ticket.

Verdict — 7.5/10

Here's where I land: they cleared the hazard zone, and they deserve credit for it. Anyone walking in expecting another Coming 2 America is going to walk out with a Mary Poppins Returns in their hands. That's a real win.

The cultural-relevance question — the post-Wintour question, what Miranda Priestly even satirizes anymore — the film can't answer with craft alone. It would need a different premise. A satire of the dispersed-authority era doesn't look like Miranda Priestly. It looks like something we haven't quite invented yet.

7.5 out of 10. Worth your Saturday afternoon. Won't change your life.

The question isn't whether they should have made it. They proved they could. The question is whether the Miranda Priestly archetype still has a target left to satirize.

And I'm not sure they answered that.