“Do you remember when magazines were a thing?” In “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” one flippant rhetorical question from Emily — now a top executive at Dior but once the first assistant to the Runway magazine editor in chief Miranda — encapsulates the crumbling state of journalism.
Its decline is what actually drives the plot of the hit sequel. Fashion is merely the Trojan stiletto that delivers the film’s bleak media premise: The industry is in freefall, layoffs and A.I. are decimating jobs, and more and more news outlets are dependent on tech money (and the whims of tech billionaires) to survive. It’s a far cry from the glossy-papered fantasy of the 2006 original hit. The new installment follows Meryl Streep (Miranda), Stanley Tucci (Nigel, Miranda’s right-hand man), Emily Blunt (Emily) and Anne Hathaway (as Andy, Miranda’s former second assistant, now Runway’s features editor) as they weather the publishing churn.
Make no mistake, the movie’s still fun, funny and fizzy. But the screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna had no interest in revisiting the story without addressing the industry shift. “It seemed like they would be in the same type of existential crises that we are in in Hollywood, frankly — a massive amount of pressure to make everything monetized to within an inch of itself, in a world where we don’t know how to make money off of digital media,” said McKenna, 58, who also wrote the screenplay for the original film. “And you know, it’s a comedy. So distress is your friend.”
The director David Frankel was even more blunt. “I do think it’s horrible what’s happened to journalists,” said Frankel, 67, whose father was an executive editor at The New York Times. “The movie is meant to spread joy and give some relief from the harsh realities of the world we live in. But I think the best kinds of entertainment are ones that meld some frothiness with some undergirding of serious intent. Journalism is in a bad place right now, objectively. Any time you’re living in a country where the First Amendment is under assault, you need to be concerned.”
Audiences didn’t seem to mind the vegetables blended into the froth: “The Devil Wears Prada 2” grossed $240 million in its opening weekend and has quickly surpassed the original’s $326 million total haul.
Laura Brown, former editor in chief of InStyle, who also held senior roles at Harper’s Bazaar and W, had a front-row seat to the changes in the fashion magazine world, and she found the sequel both entertaining and spot-on. An exchange when Emily and Miranda barter Dior ad pages for a fluff piece in Runway sparked some serious déjà vu. “That advertiser-editorial dynamic, no, I never enjoyed that,” said Brown, 51, who co-wrote the 2025 book “All the Cool Girls Get Fired” with the former WSJ Magazine editor in chief Kristina O’Neill. Brown also thought the scenes depicting corporate cost-saving measures were apt. “You can read about eight books about Condé Nast by men who miss the halcyon days and God bless, but it’s not real” anymore.
The filmmakers prioritized layering realism into “Prada 2,” particularly with the cameos, tapping the same team that wrangled the fashion luminaries for the Met Gala heist scene in “Oceans 8” (2018). “The guiding principle was to find people who are the best at what they do,” said Brosh McKenna, who made a “giant” wish list of celebrities from the worlds of sports, fashion, comedy and, yes, journalism. “I see Miranda as somebody who just loves to be around people who are excellent.” And while Lady Gaga and Donatella Versace had the most prominent cameos, the real-life scribes scattered throughout the film add media cred. Tina Brown, Kara Swisher, Jia Tolentino and Molly Jong-Fast are among those who gather at an afternoon party in Miranda’s swank Hamptons home.
“I was so pleased to see a movie that explained the situation in a way that was really generous to the people who had really done a lot for newspapers and magazines,” said Jong-Fast, 47, an MSNBC analyst and host of the “Fast Politics” podcast. But the film “also really explained how tech had basically killed the magazine.”
Ah yes, tech, as personified by Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), the menacingly oafish billionaire who tries to buy Runway for his new girlfriend, who turns out to be Emily. Though Brosh McKenna wrote the “Prada 2” script before rumors surfaced that the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was interested in buying Condé Nast (parent company of Vogue), the parallel is uncanny. Benji, a cinematic mix of Bezos with a dash of Elon Musk, was quite familiar to the veteran tech journalist Swisher, a host of the “Pivot” and “On With Kara Swisher” podcasts.
“Justin just really got to the essence of what’s wrong with these people: the carelessness, the sudden laughing at things that aren’t funny, just the complete obliviousness and the destructiveness of them,” Swisher, 63, said. “It could be a cat playing with a ball or an investigative piece by Julie K. Brown, they don’t care. It’s all the same to them.”
Amelia Dimoldenberg, host, producer and writer of the popular web series “Chicken Shop Date,” was 12 when she saw the original “Devil Wears Prada,” which inspired her to eventually study fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins college in London. Before receiving a degree in 2017, she experienced pushback from her teachers for wanting to create a video for her final project instead of a magazine. “I said, ‘I love print magazines, I grew up reading them, but at the moment I can see that things are shifting to video,’” she recalled.
Dimoldenberg, 32, actively sought out a cameo in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (“Just the back of my head could have been in the shot and I would have been fine with that”), and riffed with Theroux in a birthday party scene for the Runway publisher Irv Ravitz. “I’ll always be someone who will champion print journalism, having a degree in journalism myself,” she said. “But I also obviously am at the forefront of digital media too.”
As someone who came up in magazines in the aughts — and visited “The Devil Wears Prada” set as a young reporter the day they shot the “antibacterial wipes” scene — I found that the death-of-journalism plotline in the sequel hit hard. The movie was more realistic than it needed to be about the media (d)evolution, and that gives the bubbly comedy surprising heft. The closing crane shot showing Miranda, Nigel and Andy buzzing with activity in their offices (a tribute to the final scene of “Working Girl,” according to Brosh McKenna) made me ache with nostalgia for the heady days of magazines, while reminding me why it’s impossible to go back. The characters are, after all, enjoying what is probably just a temporary reprieve.
Still, beneath its sharp zingers and luxurious clothes, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is a big-hearted love letter to journalism and the humans who produce it. “I got teary at the end, because regardless of all the change, they still love what they did so much,” Laura Brown said. “A movie about such a cynical business was in the end so vastly uncynical.”
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