Give or take working in architecture or running a bookstore, there’s no profession more associated with the rom-com genre than journalism. From His Girl Friday to Sleepless In Seattle to How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, it’s the dream career path of smart, ambitious, yet ultimately starry-eyed women everywhere. So when 2006’s rom-com-adjacent hit The Devil Wears Prada ended with Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs leaving the cutthroat world of high fashion to take a job writing about school zones and janitor unions at a New York City newspaper, it felt like an unquestionable win. Surely a job in legacy media would leave her set for life, right? Right?
From The Los Angeles Times laying off 20 percent of its staff in 2024 to The Washington Post cutting 300 jobs just a few months ago, the current state of journalism suggests that’s very much not the case. The delightful surprise of The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that the sequel leans into that reality rather than papering over it. Though it would have been easy for returning screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna to toss in a few quips about budget cuts and algorithmic demands while largely keeping the franchise’s rom-com-ish fantasy world breezing along, she instead makes the slow death of journalism the driving force of the entire story.
Where the first film uses its high-fashion background to tell a broadly relatable coming-of-age tale about the stress of working your first real office job, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is genuinely interested in the contemporary media landscape. The film opens with Andy winning a prestigious award for investigative journalism just as she and the rest of her editorial team are laid off via text, leaving them scrambling to figure out what to do next in an industry that’s been crumbling in slow motion for a while now. One of director David Frankel’s subtler visual gags is to show Andy decompressing in one of those big, glamorous apartments journalists usually own in rom-coms, only to reveal the unit actually belongs to her art curator friend (Tracie Thoms, reprising her role from the original). Andy lives in a modest one-bedroom where she has to hit the faucet just to get the water to run clean. Even two decades as a successful newspaper writer only gets you so far.
To get the kind of glamorous lifestyle we expect of our fictional journalists, Andy has to compromise some of her values and accept a features editor role back at Runway magazine—which comes her way when her “journalism still fucking matters!” awards rant goes viral just as her old boss Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) gets canceled for accidentally promoting a fashion brand that uses sweatshops. Runway‘s owner thinks Andy’s sense of journalistic integrity will be just what the magazine needs for a rebrand. Yet while a simpler version of this story would have just been about Andy learning to fit in again, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is much more layered than that.
Runway may be a fashion magazine, but it’s struggling under the same conditions that have left the newspaper business chewed up and spit out. The magazine now largely exists in the “ether” of the internet rather than actual newsstands, ad buys are scarce, writers are all chasing the same clicks in the never-ending rat race of the attention economy, and everyone is living at the mercy of parent company CEOs and tech billionaires so detached from humanity they seem genuinely excited to fiddle while Rome burns. There’s a bittersweet, wistful feeling as fashion director Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) recalls how he used to get huge budgets to travel the world and create glamorous photo spreads. Now he gets two days to “shoot content” people will scroll past on the toilet.
Not only is it grim, it’s delightfully specific. McKenna has clearly done her homework when it comes to the realities of online writing. When Andy successfully delivers a perfect, much-praised mea culpa to get the world back on Runway‘s side, Miranda hilariously deadpans, “Did anyone besides culture writers actually read the story?” Though Andy successfully pulls off a brand-saving move, it comes from a nice-sounding headline on an article that drives no actual traffic to the site. Miranda later muses that anyone still trying to make a living in written media is just clinging to the last bits of wood floating next to the Titanic. Those of us writing at culture sites like this one probably feel the same way.
This through-line adds a welcome dose of heft to an otherwise fairly glossy legacy sequel. The power of the rom-com genre comes from its unique blend of fantasy and reality; classics like When Harry Met Sally and Breakfast At Tiffany’s serve up fairy-tale happy endings but dive into palpably real fears about love and dating before they get there. Because the Devil Wears Prada movies are fundamentally love stories between creatives and their work, they pull off that same kind of arc in the professional sphere. There’s more than a little fantasy to how Andy and Miranda are ultimately able to help Runway navigate a seemingly impossible storm that hits halfway into the second act—just as there was fantasy to Andy quitting but still getting a glowing recommendation from Miranda at the end of the first film. Yet that doesn’t make the emotional journeys the characters experience along the way any less compelling.
One of the most gut-wrenching moments in the sequel is when Andy admits, “This job has let me hope again.” She may have to spend half her day writing advertorials and fluff pieces, but at least she’s able to hire good journalists to write real, meaningful stuff the other half of the time. At least she’s able to reach an audience who doesn’t just want every single thing served to them in a vertical video or an AI summary. At least she’s actually getting fairly compensated for her work for once. The thought of even that compromised version of journalism getting ripped away is too much to bear. What will be left?
If the first Devil Wears Prada is a spiritual successor to Working Girl, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is more like an update of Broadcast News. There are ways in which changing with the times is good and necessary (much to Miranda’s HR-violating chagrin), but there are also ways we can slowly erode our own cultural values and standards without even realizing what we’re doing. As Andy points out in an emotionally raw conversation with her love interest, it’s not just media or fashion that’s in trouble. Everything is headed in this consolidated, tech-driven, billionaire-backed direction these days. “To what end?” she asks—a question that lingers because there is no answer.
More than anything, The Devil Wears Prada movies are odes to creativity, whether it’s found in fashion, photography, art, music, culture writing, hard-hitting journalism, or, hell, even fancy grilled cheese sandwiches. The world may not need a glossy magazine selling $3,000 designer purses, but a world without beauty or inspiration is a dark place indeed. If billionaire-backed fashion rags and cameo-filled legacy sequels are some of the last bastions of large-scale creativity, well, perhaps they’re worth the deal with the devil.
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