The Devil Wears Prada 2 Proves That Legacy Sequels Must Stop

Macall Polay/20th Century Studios

Put that Chanel bag down and don't attend any runway shows if you haven't seen "The Devil Wears Prada 2." Spoilers ahead!

When I sat down to see "The Devil Wears Prada 2," I couldn't help but feel excited. When I saw the original in theaters in 2006, it delighted me so much that I told my mom, who saw it with me, that I thought Andrea "Andy" Sachs' (Anne Hathaway) friends were jerks and that her job was awesome. ("I think you might have missed the point of the movie," she responded.) Despite some reservations, I knew that the 2026 sequel assembled the core original cast — Hathaway, Meryl Streep as the Anna Wintour figure Miranda Priestly, Stanley Tucci as Miranda's lieutenant Nigel Kipling, and Emily Blunt as the wonderfully incisive assistant turned fashion maven Emily Charlton — and brought director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna back as well, so I did get my hopes up.

When the credits on "The Devil Wears Prada 2" rolled, my hopes weren't just dashed. They were run over by a semi-truck and left for dead on the pavement. This legacy sequel, as my colleague BJ Colangelo noted in her review for /Film, falls largely flat, which just feels particularly punishing and depressing for people like us who love the first film. As I left the theater, dismayed and confused by everything from over-expository lines to character choices, I thought about legacy sequels and whether Hollywood should stop making them.

To be fair, there are some good legacy sequels, but they're far and few between — the ones I'll name here are "Blade Runner 2049," "Mad Max: Fury Road," and the "28 Years Later" films, which will hopefully continue past 2026's "The Bone Temple." Largely, though? This formula should die.

Paramount Pictures

When you think of a legacy sequel — which is to say, a story set in the same universe as an original film set years or even decades later, a movie that reunites audiences with old beloved characters while introducing new ones, or a hybrid of the two — some pretty bad movies probably come to mind. There's the entire "Jurassic World" franchise, a bunch of stinkers if I've ever seen them (and I only watched "Jurassic Park" for the first time in 2026 and still know that). You've got "Terminator: Genisys," "Independence Day: Resurgence," two bad "Indiana Jones" movies — "The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and "The Dial of Destiny," both of which wasted a returning Harrison Ford — and even comedies like "Coming 2 America" and "Zoolander 2." There's a rich history of legacy sequels being bad, and "The Devil Wears Prada 2" is joining the pack.

I do think there are ways to craft genuinely fun and watchable legacy sequels; the ones I mentioned before are all pretty phenomenal, and I think that's because each one of them has something new and fresh to say. That's the foundational problem with "The Devil Wears Prada 2" and other legacy sequels that, put simply, suck; they just rehash old ideas, recycle tired jokes, or do the exact same thing again. In "Zoolander 2," for example, they recycled jokes and added meaner ones, particularly at the expense of the transgender community, making it particularly disappointing. I think that's where "The Devil Wears Prada 2" commits its worst legacy sequel offenses: it says nothing new, even with 20 years of hindsight.

Macall Polay/20th Century Studios

As "The Devil Wears Prada 2" began, I was admittedly really interested in what it had to say about the state of journalism, given that the film's major inciting incident is Andy getting fired from her newspaper job after two decades, even as she wins a journalism award for her work. This points to the larger disease afflicting the journalist community across America, and I wanted the commentary to get a lot more pointed once the story introduced Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a horrifying Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos hybrid who flirts with the idea of buying Runway Magazine so that his girlfriend, Emily, can become editor-in-chief. Sadly, that commentary never materialized, and the movie's toothless approach offered nothing conclusive or insightful about the industry.

This happens over and over and over again in this movie. Miranda seems to experience some fleeting personal growth, but because the writing is so haphazard at points — particularly disappointing for me, considering that I love Aline Brosh McKenna's show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" — she just seems like a different character depending on the scene in question. From inclusivity in the fashion world to how much journalism matters in our trying times to potentially interesting questions about when the old guard should step aside and allow younger people to take over, "The Devil Wears Prada 2" presents a number of interesting ideas and then says nothing about any of them. Instead, the movie's conclusion? A friendly billionaire (Lucy Liu's Sasha Barnes) buys the entire Runway parent brand, Elias-Clark, and solves all the problems.

Legacy sequels will probably keep making money, but "The Devil Wears Prada 2" proved to me that they should stop. It is, however, in theaters now.