The characters in The Devil Wears Prada 2 are the rarest of Hollywood movie subjects in 2026: People with full-time jobs. Not Avengers or world-saving astronauts or plumbers who never bother to charge the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom for clearing Yoshis out of their pipes. The Devil Wears Prada 2’s heroine has to run her bathroom faucet for a few seconds to clear the brown water from the pipes before washing her hands. She loses one gig and is desperate to find another before her savings run dry. She made the foolish choice decades ago to pursue a career in serious journalism. Now her chosen profession is in free fall amidst mass media consolidation. Everyone she knows is facing this same problem.

I’ll admit it: These were not themes I expected from a sequel to a frothy 2006 rom-com and roman à clef about the life of a put-upon assistant to a domineering Anna Wintour-type. A follow-up decades later about the same people inhabiting the same jobs at the same glossy fashion magazine sounds like a pointless exercise in nostalgia-baiting cash grab. But in practice The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of the few major studio films released in recent years that’s actually about the state of the world outside the multiplex, and the reality that no one, from the lowliest assistant to the most reasonably well-off, is safe from the avarice of billionaires and private equity.

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That includes Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs. In the years since the first Devil Wears Prada, when Andy spent a rocky but educational tour of duty as an assistant to Runway Magazine’s ultra-stylish and ultra-cruel overlord Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), she’s traveled the world as a muckraking reporter. As The Devil Wears Prada 2 begins, she’s back in New York (in the outer boroughs apartment with brown water), where she’s honored with a prestigious journalism award — right as her entire newspaper gets liquidated by its corporate overlords as a tax write-off.

Lucky for Andy, Miranda is in the midst of a PR crisis after her magazine — which is mostly just a website these days — published a puff piece on a duplicitous sweatshop. Miranda’s own corporate overlords (Tibor Feldman and B.J. Novak as father and nepo baby executives) hire Andy as Runway’s new features editor in the hope she will restore the magazine’s journalistic credibility. Andy is skeptical about a reunion with Miranda, but she’s very happy to see Miranda’s key advisor Nigel (Stanley Tucci). She also quickly rekindles her frenemy relationship with Miranda’s other former assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), now a top executive at Dior.

Devil Wears Prada 2’s script, smartly conceived and plotted by Aline Brosh McKenna, turns its dated source material into its central idea: The media is dying and anyone left in it at this point should consider themselves lucky; survivors on “the last piece of wood floating next to the Titanic,” as one character puts it. Andy must weigh her hard-won journalistic integrity against her dwindling bank account at every turn. Is she willing to write advertorials about Emily if it means she can upgrade her dumpy one bedroom for a luxury condo? (Yes.) Could she parlay her renewed access to Miranda into a six-figure book deal for a tell-all biography about the elusive fashion icon? (Maybe.)

While Hathaway’s character drives the plot, the not-so-secret weapon in both the Pradas is the Devil herself. Streep imbues these movies, and her character, with lovely nuances and emotional complexity. The Devil Wears Prada 2 softens Miranda a little — she’s had HR complaints in recent years — but maintains her diamond-hard core, the one that pushes employees to the edge less out of malice than a singular focus and unyielding standards for this magazine she loves so dearly.

The film surrounds her with all these wonderful scene partners; not just Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci, who are all in fine form, but also Kenneth Branagh as Miranda’s loving but mostly absent husband. It’s a small role, and frankly one that’s not worthy of an actor of Branagh’s stature. But putting him in it means that when those two characters finally get a weighty moment together at The Devil Wears Prada 2’s climax, the audience is treated to Streep and Branagh in a one-on-one scene together. It’s quite a sight to behold.

Blunt gets her own amusing and insightful subplot about a romantic partner; hers, played by Justin Theroux, is a bumbling, balding tech bro with too much money and confidently wrong opinions about everything. (Just wait until you hear his thoughts on the value of the human neck.) Emily is plainly too good for this guy, but he’s also too rich for anyone to resist. She openly calls him a “patron” at one point, and his wealth becomes an important element of the power struggle that emerges in The Devil Wears Prada 2’s second and third acts, reflecting back on Andy’s own struggle to stand her moral ground in tough economic times.

Not every supporting player works quite that well. Director David Frankel replaced Andy’s old boyfriend with a new potential beau played by Patrick Brammall, a contractor who renovated Andy’s new apartment. He takes so long to show up in the movie, I naively began to think The Devil Wears Prada 2 had made the bold decision to ditch the love interest subplot demanded by this sort of film no matter how clichéd or ultimately unfulfilling it often becomes. Then Brammall’s Peter shows up, and the Runway storyline grinds to a half for a several minutes where he and Hathaway display very little chemistry amidst a lot of very forced comic banter.

I supposed, though, that Brammall’s character could be read as a mirror of the mindless content about chemical peels Andy needs to churn out for Runway between her serious articles about important social issues. Everyone needs to make concessions these days, even the people still out there doing good work among the Titanic’s wreckage.

After all, it’s not just the characters onscreen whose world has gotten upended by media mergers since the last time we saw them. The studio that released The Devil Wears Prada, 20th Century Fox, no longer exists following its acquisition by the Walt Disney Company. Despite its own lineage, Devil Wears Prada 2 still manages to be a surprisingly clear-eyed portrayal of the fight to make things of genuine value in a world dominated by corporate greed.

RATING: 7/10