The Devil Wears Prada 2 villain isn't Miranda: it's someone who spent 20 years waiting for her chair
Two decades after fetching the coffees and forfeiting Paris, the British one finally makes her move — and the sequel is rather more interesting for it.
Here is the neat trick of The Devil Wears Prada 2: Miranda Priestly, cinema's most reliable monster, spends the entire film as the underdog. The actual menace is Emily Charlton — the shrieking, cerulean-souled first assistant of 2006, now a Dior executive with genuine power and a very long memory. If you spent twenty years being told "a million girls would kill for this job" whilst doing two people's work on a juice cleanse, you might also fancy a spot of regicide.
The plot obliges her handsomely. Andy (Anne Hathaway), now a respected journalist, returns to Runway as features editor to find the empire subsiding: nobody reads the print edition, the magazine is surviving on clickbait and short-form video, and a puff piece about a fashion brand running sweatshops has torched what credibility remained. Emily leverages the scandal, then conspires with Justin Theroux's billionaire Benji Barnes to buy Runway outright and bin Miranda. The devil, it turns out, is whoever holds the purse strings.
Blunt saw this coming
Emily Blunt clocked the shape of it before she'd even read the script, telling reporters during production:
"We always have beef with each other. I don't know what it is. Let's hope we remedy it. I'm not sure."
Her other observation — "Why are Meryl and I so mean to each other in every movie we do?" — is a fair question after Into the Woods and Mary Poppins Returns, and the sequel's answer is: because it prints money.
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The receipts
Because it did, rather a lot of it:
- £-adjacent numbers: $693.1 million worldwide against a $100 million budget, with a $233.6 million global opening.
- Domestically: $76.7 million in its first weekend — nearly triple what the original managed in 2006.
- Reception: 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, a more grudging 63 on Metacritic, and an A− CinemaScore, a full grade up on the original's B.
- The bench: Stanley Tucci back as Nigel, plus Kenneth Branagh as Miranda's husband, Lucy Liu and B.J. Novak among the new intake.
The critics who resisted mostly objected to the nostalgia machinery — one review filed it under "nostalgia bait" outright. Audiences, evidently, were happy to be baited.
The first film asked whether Andy would sell her soul for the job. The sequel's colder question: what happens to the people who did sell, delivered twenty years of service, and were still never going to be given the chair unless they took it.
Whether Emily gets to keep it, the film leaves for a possible third round. Blunt's beef, presumably, remains unremedied.
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