The Devil Wears Prada 2: Sold on Nostalgia?

If the summer of 2026 has strongly echoed certain past summers (not least, the deeply disappointing summer of 2023) it also had its more anomalous features, not least the summer season opening with The Devil Wears Prada 2. Less sign of the times than accident (the studio just opportunistically seized on the vacating of that weekend by a desperate-to-recapture-its Phrase Three glory days Marvel when it bumped its latest Avengers film from May to December), it seemed very much a sign of the times in the backers of the movie, having left the cinematic side of the franchise fallow for two decades in spite of the publication of sequels to the original novel, deciding to put out a Part Two at this time--a reflection of the ever more ruthless exploitation of any prior success, however out of date the content.

For there is indeed a case that this material was very badly dated. Consider the narrative: Aspiring Serious Journalist Goes to Work for Fashion Magazine She Thinks Beneath Her With Boss From Hell, Embraces the Pleasures of the Superficial, Learns Boss From Hell is Human After All, and Has Her Principles Tested Before Returning to Original Serious Journalist Career Trajectory. In spite of the obligatory moralizing about, retreat from, reconciliation to not being part of the Condé Nasty world Andy Sachs' trajectory traced (for after all the film was a vacation from Real Life, not relocation to the Promised Land of the Beautiful People) this was ultimately a love letter to the Miranda Priestlys of the world and all that they represent (this movie really very conventional and conservative in every way, even the ways in which it contradicted itself). And so one may wonder if, after the Great Recession and the fraying of "globalization," after the pandemic, and a second generation of declining prospects for the many; after "relatability" became the coin of the virtual realm in this age of living through one's cell phone screen; after the decline of popular attention to celebrity generally and haute couture especially; after "body positivity" replacing beauty on our screens and the "I'm just like you|" fraud of the Internet influencer the "I'm not just like you!" fraud of the old-time product endorser; would all this really have very many takers? Frankly trying to make a go of all this seemed to me to be awfully obtuse--with all this underlined by how the studio was releasing what looked like, and in fact was, a great big heaping celebration of privilege, luxury, snobbery, upper-class self-satisfaction and pretension, toxic employers and general downward-punching #Girlboss bourgeois feminism promising only more of the same actually hit theaters on the day of global social protest that is International Worker's Day (an irony that the provincial and class-terrified American media, of course, did not register).

As it happened, even allowing for inflation Prada 2 was a bigger hit than the original (the nearly $690 million it grossed about 30 percent more than the $530 million the first film's $326 million in 2006 would be if we adjust the numbers for today's prices), a feat the more impressive for the shrunken nature of the post-pandemic market; and almost certainly brought in a healthy profit. (The movie's $100 million production cost may go with a similarly hefty promotional cost, all as reuniting the original cast may mean a healthy cut going to "residuals and participations," but I can easily see eventual all-sources revenue north of $500 million leaving the studio with $200 million+, very likely enough to land it a place on Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster list of the top ten profit-makers next year, in the event that they dare to hold the Tournament.) The result is that what the movie offers does indeed seem to have been salable, suggesting that the appeal of vicarious contact with that unrelatable world of glamour and celebrity and luxury is not yet past--though a subtler explanation does occur to me, namely that a Prada sequel is the better able to sell those things because, in contrast with a movie doing so from scratch, it had done so in the past. Because for the target audience Andy and Miranda and the rest are old friends, seeing whom offers them nostalgia for a less hard-bitten time when that ever more remote fantasy of glamour and celebrity and luxury could reach them, such that the new offering reaches them by the roundabout route of evoking the memory of when it had done so the first time. Still, if Hollywood had a winner here (commercially at least), given the way the studios have gone on operating in their stubborn insistence on adhesion to the flagging blockbuster model rather than aiming for the targeted hits the current market demands, I think it more likely that this was one time when they were not clever, but simply lucky, in producing a sequel that a sizable audience actually wanted.