The Devil Wears Prada 2 knows my world; it just doesn’t want to stay there

Cut to 2026. I walked into the sequel carrying nearly two decades of a media career on my back and high expectations. Within the first few minutes I found myself thinking — well, this is a little close to home.

The film opens with Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) receiving a journalism award. A nice moment. And then, almost immediately, everyone in the room gets a message on their phones that they have all been fired, their publication shut down. For anyone who has spent time working in media, it lands with a certain added familiarity. The anxiety of redundancy, the restructuring announcements, the sudden organisational changes, these are not alien experiences for people in this industry. Most of us have been through some version of it, or know people who have. So yes, that scene registers a little differently when you are watching it from the inside.

A still from Devil Wears Prada 2.

ALSO READ: Maybe the problem isn’t Junaid Khan-Sai Pallavi-starrer Ek Din, it’s us

Then there is Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). In the original she was the ultimate power centre — designers previewing collections for her before the rest of the world, her word final, assistants trembling at the sound of her coat hitting a desk. In the sequel, she is in a different position entirely, doing what it takes to keep the brand happy, to protect the advertiser relationship, to hold on to relevance in a media world that has moved on considerably. It is a recognisable shift for anyone who has watched the magazine industry change over the past two decades.

I have worked in organisations where magazines reigned supreme — big budgets, lavish celebrity shoots, fashion spreads that took weeks to conceptualise and produce, entire teams dedicated to getting a single layout exactly right. There was a time when a print magazine felt permanent, untouchable. And then that world contracted. Digital came, budgets shrank, the logic of the business shifted entirely, and those grand productions became fond memories of a model the industry could no longer justify. The arrival of new ownership and what follows, the cost-cutting, the restructuring, the quiet sidelining of people whose experience is suddenly reframed as excess baggage, all of it plays out on screen with a familiarity that those from the same world will recognise. Some of us have been on the wrong side of it.

But here is the thing, it only grazes the surface of all this. This is, of course, a glossy Hollywood film — a feel-good entertainer, not a serious examination of what happened to the publishing industry. The changing media landscape is present, but as texture rather than substance — a knowing nod, a recognisable reference, and then the story moves on. For those of us from the industry, the recognition is there, but it stays at a surface level. The film opens a door it has no intention of walking through.

A still from Devil Wears Prada 2.

Once you set that aside, what remains is a film trying to do what the original did – be entertaining, glamorous, and ultimately satisfying to watch. And this is where it runs into difficulty, because the original did all of that very well, and the sequel struggles to match it.

The first film earned its feel-good ending. You had spent enough time with Andy, rooted for her, been frustrated on her behalf, and when she finally found her footing it felt genuinely satisfying. The sequel reaches for the same feeling without quite doing the work to deserve it.

The plot is thin and too predictable. Andy Sachs, twenty years into a journalism career, is still seeking Miranda’s validation in almost the same way she did as a wide-eyed intern – a dynamic that needed either proper exploration or proper resolution, and gets neither. Andy’s deference reads as if the writers needed her to be in a certain emotional position for the plot to function. Twenty years should change a person. It should change their relationship to authority, to validation, to the woman who once made their life a daily exercise in humiliation.

The acquisition of Runway by Sasha Barnes, played by Lucy Liu, is visible from so far away that by the time it lands on screen it feels more like a box being ticked than a genuine plot development.

A still from Devil Wears Prada 2.

The performances, particularly Streep’s, are not the problem. Everyone shows up and does the work. The problem is that the story around them does not give enough to work with — it is neither sharp enough as commentary nor engaging enough as entertainment to fully land on either front. The fashion, too, while present, doesn’t carry the same cultural impact.

The original worked as well as it did because it was a film about identity disguised as a film about fashion. Andy was not really struggling to survive Miranda Priestly. She was struggling to figure out who she was willing to become, and at what cost. That tension between ambition and self-respect, between the seductive pull of a glamorous world and the life you had imagined for yourself , gave the film genuine universal appeal, even if the setting was rarefied.

The sequel has a premise that could have done something equally compelling — a woman 20 years into a career, an industry in freefall, a mentor diminished by the changing times. There is a real film in that. This one just never quite finds it. It has the clothes, the locations, the performances. What it is missing is the thing that made you care in the first place.