"The Devil Wears Prada 2" bets audiences care about the magazine industry's future. That's a ballsy premise for a sequel arriving nearly two decades after the original crushed it at the box office.
The first film's most iconic moment centers on Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly delivering a brutal monologue to Andy Sachs about fashion's reach. It's the scene everyone remembers. Streep's performance deserved an Oscar nomination but never got one, a fact the industry still gets wrong.
The sequel anchors itself on whether viewers will invest in Runway magazine's survival in a digital-first world. That's not exactly the stuff of mainstream blockbusters. Fashion magazines have cratered since 2006. Print advertising vanished. Websites replaced glossy pages.
Yet the original "Devil Wears Prada" proved people don't need personal stakes in an industry to find it entertaining. They came for the fashion, the cattiness, the power dynamics. They stayed for Streep owning every scene.
Whether audiences actually care about magazines in 2024 remains the real question. The sequel is betting they'll follow Andy and Miranda through industry collapse anyway. That's either genius or delusion. The box office will decide.