Has the new Devil Wears Prada lost its bite?

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the most anticipated film of 2026 so far. But the publicity campaign suggests the original's satire has been softened – along with Meryl Streep's toxic boss villain.

Last autumn, when Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci popped up at the Dolce & Gabbana show in Milan costumed as Miranda Priestley and Nigel Kipling to shoot a scene for The Devil Wears Prada 2, the event served as an amusing tease for the new film, a follow-up to the 2006 hit.

At that same show, Streep-as-Miranda posed for photos with Anna Wintour – a sly acknowledgement that the long-time Vogue editor was, indeed, the inspiration for the character, the imperious, icy editor of a fashion magazine that Streep turned into an instantly recognisable icon.

But that was just the start of an over-the-top publicity campaign that has conflated on-screen and off-screen personalities and leant heavily on Wintour. By now the PR, clever and fun at the start, has grown into something more annoying, and so inescapable it threatens to overwhelm the film itself. And it's also left question marks around whether the sequel will turn out to be a shadow of the original, without its bite.

Last month Wintour presented at the Oscars with Anne Hathaway, who plays heroine Andy, Miranda's lowly assistant in the first film. In a lame comic bit, Wintour called Hathaway "Emily", the name of Emily Blunt's fellow assistant character, getting her name wrong just the way Miranda did.

And last week the internet exploded when Vogue dropped a cover photo of Streep as Miranda next to Wintour; inside, there was a joint interview with Streep (out of character) and Wintour. Reactions to the cover on social media were mixed, ranging from an Instagram comment that reads "It's a cultural overlap people have been waiting to see," to derisive responses including one on X that says simply "This is so embarrassing".

This is not the only recent film publicity tour to blur the lines between actors and fictional characters, an approach that suits this cultural and political moment, when fiction and  reality often seem similarly blurred. Timothée Chalamet's stunts for the Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme, in which he played an arrogant opportunist, included a viral video in which he pretended to be an egotistical version of himself taking over a marketing meeting. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo's weepy declarations of friendship on the first Wicked tour, mirroring their........

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