Anne Hathaway used her producing credit on The Devil Wears Prada 2 to make a specific demand: no models who are "alarmingly thin," as Meryl Streep relayed the conversation during the film's press tour in Mexico City. [1] The sequel opens May 1 with the full original cast returning — Streep, Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci — making it one of 2026's most anticipated studio releases before a frame of marketing had run.

Streep's account of Hathaway's position spread quickly because it inverts the original film's premise. [1] The 2006 Devil Wears Prada depicted fashion's cruelty toward the body as an ambient fact of the industry — mocked, suffered, absorbed. Hathaway's producing intervention, two decades later, inserts that same body image discourse into the production process rather than just the text. The sequel was always going to be about what the fashion world became; apparently it will also, in some measure, reflect what the people making it became.

Blunt, speaking in Tokyo, said Hathaway remains her favorite co-star. [2] Both are in full promotional mode for a film whose pre-release positioning has been shrewdly managed: global press tours in Mexico City, Tokyo, and Shanghai, each generating distinct coverage cycles. The Shanghai lookbook — Streep and Hathaway's fashion choices catalogued for Chinese social media — has already circulated widely. [2]

The body image statement is smart strategy as much as conviction. It positions the sequel as self-aware rather than nostalgic, acknowledging the critique that the original film romanticized an industry that causes harm. Whether the film earns that positioning remains a May 1 question.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles