‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Makes An Unusually Strong Case For A Legacy Sequel

Four decades after a mid-’80s mini-boom in projects like Psycho II and The Color of Money brought some novelty to sequel-mania, it’s no longer so unusual for legacy sequels to pick up with beloved characters 10, 20, or 30 years after a previous film. In fact, sometimes it seems like Hollywood is systematically going through every movie that made $50 million domestic or more since 1996 or so, and evaluating whether it might be turned into a multi-generational saga. (Movies from before 1996 can just be distended into streaming miniseries watched by no one.) Case in point: The Devil Wears Prada, the toast of the 2006 summer movie season, now the subject of a big summer-kickoff sequel expected to do blockbuster numbers at the box office.

20 years ago, it wasn’t so wildly unusual for a starry bit of summer counter-programming to post blockbuster grosses, and Prada performed the