With the benefit of hindsight, it seems like 2006 The devil wears Prada It was released at the height of mainstream media’s dominance of our attention, a moment when magazines and legacy media seemed to rule the world and wield unbridled influence and power.
The devil wears prada 2At the same time, it is a eulogy to the industry’s sad decline, a biting satire that will hit close to home for anyone working in media. (Below are some spoilers from the film’s media-centric plot.)
The Internet existed in 2006, of course, but Facebook was still only open to students; Twitter was founded two months before the film was released. The Huffington Post was only a year old. Blogs like Gawker get a lot of hype, but real-life magazine editors like Anna Wintour are often the subject of her focus and curiosity.
if The devil wears Prada captured the dwindling heyday of legacy media, The devil wears prada 2 It captures the current, turbulent and uncertain moment.
In the first film, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) was not only adored by fashion icons and journalists, but also her role at the top. Runway The magazine makes her the most powerful person in the entire fashion industry. The media platform was so powerful that the priesthood and Runway It can define terms for an entire sector of the economy, and an entire fashion culture.
This power dynamic is punctured early in the second film, when Priestley is forced to travel to the office of a major fashion advertiser to grovel and negotiate a good deal, after… Runway It is being humiliated in a PR crisis sparked by TikTokers and influencers exposing shoddy reporting in its pages, a sign of where cultural influence has shifted.
The film includes the hunt for a beluga whale in an interview (something every magazine journalist knows well), multiple conversations about metrics for engagement in stories (ditto), and one highlight is deemed to have met Priestley’s high standards when she announced it as being installed at the top of the film. Runway Social accounts.
In the original film, most of the comments come from Priestley, who is concerned that her personal life has become tabloid fodder for Page Six. “Rupert Murdoch should cut me a check for all the papers I sell to him,” she joked. Of course, Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, the studio that released the first film (a spokesman at the time said he also “laughed out loud” at the line).
But the mid-2000s may have been the last time newspaper sales were relevant to media budgets. The world of media has gone digital, and that’s the world that Priestley and Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) must navigate in the sequel.
In the first film, influence and wealth Runway Indisputable. The second film is about cuts that any working journalist knows well today.
The opening scene of The devil wears prada 2 He sees a local newspaper closed so the company owner can deduct taxes, even when he receives a multi-million dollar salary (sound familiar?). Journalists, led by Sachs, find out through a text message while accepting an award for their work. Her speech went viral, sparking developments in the film.
McKinsey consultants (or maybe it’s Boston Consulting Group? Either way, they’re almost certainly Harvard Business School graduates, Priestley notes) “helped” Elias Clarke obtain his rights at the urging of a toddler in tracksuits. the Runway The budget for features has been cut, as has the budget for travel (one funny scene sees Priestley walking through business class on a plane and up to economy class). Runway The staff who have been there for too long will face a stumbling block, as Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) seems resigned to his fate.
In fact, the film is full of references to real-life media rumours. A subplot involves Priestley trying to get a promotion to chief content officer at Elias Clarke, the Condé Nast-inspired media company that owns Runway. Anna Wintour, who inspired the character Priestly, was named chief content officer at Condé in 2020.
Wintour seemed to enjoy the film, having attended the world premiere in New York last week, where Hollywood Reporter I spotted her talking with former Disney CEO Bob Iger at the orchestra level before it started.
The main plot involves Benjy Barnes (Justin Theroux), a billionaire who was once obsessed with technology but is now interested in technology and laughter. exactly Like Jeff Bezos, who (spoiler) is interested in the acquisition Runway For his significant other, a clear indication of a long time ago, long Bezos is rumored to be interested in the acquisition Vogue magazine. Will the already wealthy vanity owner give? Runway The freedom he requires to do his job? There’s a whole conversation between Priestley and Sachs about that too (looking at you The Washington Post, time and Atlantic).
The film is full of cameos, and while many of them are mainstream or familiar to fashionistas (Donatella Versace and Lady Gaga make memorable appearances), the filmmakers also squeeze in brief cameos by the likes of Tina Brown, Kara Swisher, and Molly Jong-Fast, who are hardly household names outside of media circles.
There’s certainly a lot to criticize, as it stands THR David Rooney noted in his review of the film that there is a glorification of wealth and fashion that seems out of place at the moment. Magazine editors, even those at Condé Nast, could only dream of the apartment Sachs secured after her new job.
There have been plenty of films about media over the years, chronicling the glory days of newspapers, television, or media in general: Highlight. All the president’s men. Broadcast news. The insider. Zodiac.
All of those films reflected the moment they were trying to represent. The devil wears prada 2It turns out that it pretty much follows that template, albeit with a sarcastic flair, high-end costumes in every scene, and far fewer life-or-death stakes.
And the concluding message, about the willingness of wealthy media benefactors to leave their editorial prizes alone, has had its fair share of real-world successes over the past few years, though perhaps Runway It’ll end up being more like Atlanticinstead of The Washington Post.
