After two decades of polite refusals, two unused book sequels, and one famously skeptical Meryl Streep, the long-shelved follow-up finally hits theaters May 1. The story of how it almost didn’t happen — and what finally cracked it open.
By the time Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci slid back behind the desks of Runway magazine in the summer of 2025, the joke had practically calcified into industry lore: a sequel to The Devil Wears Pradawas the project everyone wanted and no one could get made.
For nearly twenty years, that calculus held. The 2006 original — a David Frankel-directed adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s roman à clef, scripted by Aline Brosh McKenna and produced by Wendy Finerman — pulled in roughly $327 million worldwide, made Streep’s icy editor-in-chief a permanent reference point, and seeded enough Halloween costumes, gird-your-loins memes, and cerulean-blue monologue reaction GIFs to stock a small Tumblr. It was, by every conventional metric, a sequel waiting to happen.
What it didn’t have was a Meryl Streep who wanted to make one.
The polite refusals
The original creative team had every reason to be open to a follow-up — Frankel and McKenna built an unusually durable comedic register, and Finerman’s Sunswept Entertainment shingle had reason to revisit its biggest hit. The roadblocks were upstairs in the cast list. Streep was, by all accounts and her own recent admission, simply not interested. Hathaway, for her part, demurred more diplomatically: she’d happily reunite with the same people, she said over the years, but only on something distinctly new.
That stance hardened into a kind of received wisdom around the property. Two of the four leads were polite no’s; the entire enterprise rested on Streep, full stop, and Streep — who had famously walked into the original by demanding double her initial offer because, as she recalled to Jenna Bush Hager on Today this week, she was 56 and had finally figured out she could — was not chasing the encore.
There were also, in fairness, plenty of distractions. The years immediately after Prada were arguably the most commercially productive of Streep’s career, anchored by Mamma Mia!, It’s Complicated, and an Oscar win for The Iron Lady. Hathaway moved on to The Dark Knight Rises, Les Misérables (and her own Oscar), and an eventual reputational reset. Blunt became Blunt. Tucci became, somehow, an even more beloved Tucci. Nobody needed Prada 2. The creative team didn’t have a take. The actors didn’t have an itch.
The books that were never adapted
The peculiar thing is that source material existed — twice over.
In 2013, Weisberger published Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, picking up Andy a decade later as a bridal-magazine editor on the verge of marriage when Miranda re-enters her orbit. In 2018 came When Life Gives You Lululemons, a third installment that pivoted away from Andy entirely to focus on Emily Charlton, with Miranda relegated to late-book cameos. Either could have provided a runway, so to speak, into a screen sequel.
Neither did. The 2026 film borrows nothing of consequence from either novel. Per the production, McKenna’s screenplay is an original story — Weisberger is credited as co-screenwriter alongside her, but the bones are McKenna’s. Whatever interest the books generated in fan circles, they apparently didn’t crack the screen problem.
What changed in 2024
The unlock came, by Streep’s own framing, from the world rather than from the studio. In a recent Today sit-down, she suggested that the industry the original satirized — glossy print, masthead politics, the closed system of taste-makers and advertisers — had simply mutated enough that there was, finally, something to say.
Walt Disney Studios and 20th Century Studios moved into early development in July 2024, with McKenna writing, Frankel circling to direct, and Finerman returning to produce. Within weeks, all four originals were in talks; by the end of the year, all four had signed on. Hathaway has been the most public about what tipped her: McKenna, she told Today, had found an angle past nostalgia, and that took the pressure off doing the thing fans wanted versus the thing the material deserved.
That angle, judging from the finished film and the trailers’ tease, is a head-on confrontation with the collapse of the world the original lived in. Prada 2 opens with Andy losing her newspaper job at the fictional New York Vanguard after private-equity liquidation — a beat that landed with grim recognition at industry screenings — and routes her back to Runway as features editor, where Miranda is mid-PR-crisis and the magazine itself is being eyed by a Justin Theroux-played tech billionaire whose interest in journalism is roughly that of a cat’s interest in a houseplant. AI, content slop, oligarch-class buyers, the great unbundling: it’s all there.
It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, a movie arriving at the precise moment that Anna Wintour — long the open-secret muse for Miranda — has stepped back from Vogue‘s editor-in-chief role into a global content position at Condé Nast. The avatar is being asked to navigate, on screen, a version of the same restructuring its inspiration is navigating off it.
The cast list grew up
If the original was a tight ensemble piece, the sequel is unmistakably a legacy event, with a who’s-who gravity that befits a 20-year wait. Kenneth Branagh joined as Miranda’s husband. Lucy Liu, Simone Ashley, B.J. Novak, Pauline Chalamet, Patrick Brammall, Caleb Hearon, Helen J. Shen, Conrad Ricamora, and Rachel Bloom round out new players. Tracie Thoms and Tibor Feldman reprise. Lady Gaga turns up alongside Doechii on an original song titled “Runway.” Donatella Versace shot a cameo at Milan Fashion Week. Adrian Grenier, who played Andy’s much-maligned boyfriend Nate in the original, was reportedly approached for a cameo but production timing didn’t allow it — he has, charmingly, said he understood the character wasn’t beloved and would be open to a Nate spin-off, an idea no one is rushing to greenlight.
Principal photography ran June 30 to October 20, 2025, between Manhattan, Newark, and Milan. The production wrapped quickly, premiered at Lincoln Center on April 20, and rolled into a global press tour spanning Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, London, and Milan. The first full trailer notched 222 million views in 24 hours, which 20th Century has called the most-watched trailer in its studio’s history.
A legacy sequel, fashionably late
The reviews that hit Wednesday morning are, broadly, the kind that a 20-year-late legacy sequel almost has to receive: a swirl of pleased nostalgia, qualified praise for the media-industry satire, and a few sharper notes about whether the sequel is fashion-forward or merely fast-fashion. The Hollywood Reporter‘s own review flagged the journalism-death commentary as the script’s sharpest material; IndieWire compared the film to a shape that’s there but with frayed details; RogerEbert.com called the wardrobe occasionally stale but Streep’s read of a slightly diminished Miranda quietly devastating. Justin Chang, in The New Yorker, wrote that the movie sells preposterous goods awfully well.
That last verdict may be the most honest summary of why this took 20 years. The Devil Wears Prada worked, in 2006, as a glossy genre exercise hiding a sneakily sharp argument about taste, ambition, and what people are willing to compromise to belong. The reason a sequel was so hard to crack — and the reason it sat dormant through two book follow-ups, multiple changes in Disney leadership, the streaming wars, and a pandemic — is that the second movie had to be about something other than the closet, the cerulean monologue, or the moment Andy salutes Miranda from across Sixth Avenue. It had to find an argument worth dressing up.
By the time the world had migrated enough — the magazines hollowed, the journalism contracted, the tech billionaires circling — the argument was waiting. McKenna picked it up. Streep, finally, said yes.
It only took twenty years.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens in theaters May 1.
