LOS ANGELES — Miranda Priestly has survived everything. The collapse of her marriage, the desertion of her assistants, the kind of Paris moment that, in any other film, would have finished her. What she has not survived yet, and what The Devil Wears Prada 2 finally reckons with, is the internet.
The sequel arrives on Disney+ and Hulu today, completing a theatrical run that produced $690 million worldwide and pushed the franchise past the $1 billion mark in combined earnings from both films. For audiences who missed its May theatrical opening, today is the day it becomes accessible without a ticket.
The 2006 original, also directed by David Frankel, grossed $326 million on a $35 million budget and made “Cerulean” a cultural shorthand for the way power operates through aesthetic authority. Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly became the template against which fictional executives have been measured since, a figure who is right about everything and wrong about the things that cost the most. Anne Hathaway’s performance as Andy Sachs announced her as an actor capable of holding ground with the most precisely calibrated performer of her generation. The sequel inherits all of that, and the difficulty of matching it.
Frankel returns, as does screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, who adapted Lauren Weisberger’s novel for the original. Wendy Finerman again produces. The film reunites the franchise’s four principals: Streep as Miranda, Hathaway as Andy Sachs, Emily Blunt as Emily Charlton, and Stanley Tucci as Nigel Kipling, twenty years further along in a media environment that has not been generous to the kind of institution Miranda built.
The premise is harder-edged than a nostalgia vehicle has any right to be. Andy is a mid-career journalist when her newspaper folds at the film’s outset, a casualty of the same advertising contraction working its way through print media globally, and she comes back to Runway not as the young woman who fled Paris but as someone who needs a job. That inversion, Miranda re-hiring the person who once rejected her, is the film’s central engine. Runway is under pressure from declining print advertising, the algorithmic indifference of digital platforms, and a generation of fashion readers who have never held a copy of the magazine and find out what to wear from someone with three million followers and no institutional affiliation. Shooting across New York, Milan, and Lake Como, Frankel gives the sequel the visual confidence of the original: the clothes still register, the rooms are still calibrated to intimidate, but the world outside those rooms has changed, and the film does not pretend otherwise.
Emily Charlton, meanwhile, has moved well past the limits of Runway’s masthead. Blunt plays her as a luxury brand executive who has converted the survival instincts she developed under Miranda into something resembling genuine authority, one the original never had room for. Her relationship to Miranda is now lateral rather than vertical: competitive, wary, and occasionally gleeful in a way that was never available to her as an assistant. Blunt’s scenes with Streep carry a different charge from the Streep-Hathaway ones. Where Hathaway’s Andy retains residual caution, Blunt’s Emily watches Miranda with something closer to assessment.
Tucci’s Nigel remains the film’s emotional register, the character most aware of what has been lost in the industry he gave his career to and most reluctant to name it directly. His exchanges with Streep carry more accumulated weight than they did in the original, partly because both characters have reached the age at which the industry they devoted themselves to has stopped being grateful.
The new additions expand the film’s landscape considerably. Kenneth Branagh plays a media investor whose interest in Runway is not entirely editorial. Lucy Liu appears as a digital executive whose platform has quietly absorbed a generation of Runway’s advertiser base. Justin Theroux and B.J. Novak fill a world noticeably more crowded and less deferential than the one Miranda once navigated without visible effort. Simone Ashley rounds out a supporting cast the film deploys to mark how much the industry has shifted. Lady Gaga, contributing an original song, makes a cameo the film earns rather than simply announces. Donatella Versace and Marc Jacobs appear as themselves in what amount to extended establishing shots of the fashion ecosystem Runway is struggling to keep pace with.
The critical response has been measured admiration. The Hollywood Reporter said Streep “lets us a little deeper into Miranda’s psyche without losing that magnetic elusiveness,” describing the performance as the film’s clearest asset even as the review found the sequel occasionally drifting from the sharper implications of its premise into “cozy sentimentality.” Others noted that the film works best when it leans into what it is: a sequel that reconfigures its trio of women into new adversarial positions and delivers the pleasures of that reconfiguration without overreaching. The Tomatometer sits at 78 percent; the audience score at 84.
The $690 million global gross, on a reported production budget of $100 million, makes the sequel the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2026. It arrives on streaming in a summer that has seen strong theatrical competition; Spider-Man: Brand New Day, opening this week to early screenings and a 90 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, is among the films ahead of it. The combined franchise total has now crossed $1 billion, a benchmark few sequels reach twenty years removed from their predecessor.
Whether a third film follows is not something any of the principals has confirmed. Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci have each indicated willingness to return; Frankel and McKenna have not foreclosed the possibility; and $690 million on $100 million makes the question straightforward for the studios involved. None of that is an announcement. What the sequel leaves behind instead is a Miranda Priestly who is still the most formidable person in any room she occupies, but for the first time uncertain that the rooms themselves will last.
