After countless years of endless speculation, conflicting interviews from its stars, and a delightful on-stage reunion at this year’s SAG Awards, those of us who still worship at the feet of the cult classic that is The Devil Wears Prada finally have the news we’ve been waiting for: at last, 18 years on, a sequel is now in the works.
If you’re getting whiplash, you’re not the only one. Back in October 2022, during a red carpet interview, Anne Hathaway told Entertainment Tonight categorically that “there’s not going to be a sequel. It’s not gonna happen. We can’t do it.” Even more recently, in April 2024, when asked about the possibility of a sequel by V Magazine, she reiterated that it was “probably not” going to happen, though she was notably less definitive in shutting down the rumours. “We all love each other and if somebody could come up with a way to do it, I think we’d all be crazy not to,” she said. “But there’s a huge difference in the world now with technology, and one of the things about that particular story is it was about producing a physical object. Now with so much being digital, it would just be very different. Maybe me, Stanley, Emily, Meryl, Dave Frankel, Patricia Field… we should just all do something else together. That’d be fun.”
But now, it looks like that particular gang – or at least most of them – could be reuniting for a follow-up film after all. Per Variety, Disney is in early development on a sequel, with the original film’s screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna in talks to pen the next chapter. The storyline will reportedly follow “Miranda Priestly as she navigates her career amid the decline of traditional magazine publishing and faces off against Blunt’s character, Emily Charlton, now a high-powered executive for a luxury group with advertising dollars that Priestly desperately needs”. Puck, which was first to report the story, added that both Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt had signed on to return, alongside The Devil Wears Prada’s producer Wendy Finerman. According to Deadline, David Frankel could also be back in the director’s chair, and we have high hopes for Stanley Tucci, too, given he said he’d “happily play Nigel again” as recently as 2023.
As a result, all eyes are now on Hathaway. If Andrea Sachs does make an appearance in the new story, will she still be “the wide-eyed girl peddling her earnest newspaper stories” or will she also have transitioned to a more lucrative career? Either way, just don’t expect her to be with Adrian Grenier’s Nate. In a 2023 interview with Variety, Brosh McKenna speculated about where some of the characters she’d created in rom-coms past would be today. “Andy and Nate are definitely not together,” she asserted. “That much I can tell you.” Amen.
The original article can be found on Vogue UK.
