In The Satan Wears Prada 2, we’re launched to a very totally different Miranda Priestly. There was a time the place the omnipotent queen of vogue – who’s performed by Meryl Streep and primarily based on Vogue’s longest-serving editor, Anna Wintour – may finish careers with a look. However this time, she spends many of the film taking orders herself. First, we see her on the behest of advertisers, then publishing magnate Irv Ravitz and his irritating nepo child son. And it isn’t lengthy earlier than Benji Barnes, an eccentric billionaire, exhibits up and threatens to dismantle the excellence she has spent her complete profession championing.
Within the movie, Benji is performed – scarily effectively, I ought to add – by Justin Theroux. After a high-profile divorce, he has had a “glow-up”, which loosely interprets to losing a few pounds and boasting a deep mahogany tan. Put up-divorce, he’s now in a relationship with Emily – Miranda’s acerbic former assistant, performed by the scene-stealing Emily Blunt, who’s described as “each woman who ignored him in highschool”. Benji’s inclusion within the story feels consultant of the broader media panorama, the place the whims of billionaires determine which components of the previous, pre-social media world get to outlive. And for Emily, she’s studying that being related to somebody so {powerful} has the potential to assist her lastly step out of Miranda’s shadow. The romance between these diametric opposites – Kind A vogue queen and a nerd who grew as much as grow to be one of many world’s richest males – offers a stream of comedian reduction. However past the laughs are a deeper – and bleaker – assertion about how folks with sufficient cash should buy cultural energy.
So, who’s Benji Barnes primarily based on? It doesn’t take a genius to see the similarities with Jeff Bezos – the Amazon founder who, after his divorce from MacKenzie Scott in 2019, has had a (how ought to I put this?) visible transformation. Not solely that, however within the film, Benji’s ex-wife, Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), has determined to dedicate her life to philanthropy – equally to Scott who pledged to donate half of her $37bn divorce settlement.
Then we now have Emily. Now working as a high-powered vogue govt, Emily is decided to make use of her boyfriend’s standing as a strategy to launch herself into the highlight. Once more, there’s an apparent parallel with how Bezos’s new spouse, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, has used their much-publicized union to lift her personal profile. Final yr, she (actually) launched herself on a #GirlBoss flight to area alongside Katy Perry, of all folks, earlier than showing on a digital cowl of Vogue. And the couple’s luxurious 2025 wedding ceremony in Venice was attended by everybody from Oprah Winfrey to the Kardashians, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ivanka Trump, Invoice Gates and the designer Domenico Dolce, whose vogue home Dolce & Gabbana designed her wedding ceremony gown. There have been even experiences that Sánchez desires to be a Bond woman, after Amazon acquired the rights to the 007 franchise in 2022. And even when there’s not any reality to that, the truth that it feels vaguely throughout the realms of chance speaks volumes about how the standing of the previous host of So You Assume You Can Dance? has been reworked.
Alongside the much-publicized launch of The Satan Wears Prada 2, there’s one other fascinatingly “meta” subplot within the headlines. The sequel kicks off with an enormous scandal that breaks on the evening of the Priestly-verse’s model of the Met Gala. And this yr, the real-life occasion has been plunged into controversy over Bezos’s function as honorary chair (and essential supply of funding), with rumors of celebrities boycotting the occasion in protest. (Although primarily based on final evening’s packed purple carpet, it doesn’t seem to be too lots of them adopted via.)
Bezos might be not supporting the Met Gala – vogue’s largest evening – out of the goodness of his coronary heart. His involvement displays the extent to which he has been making an attempt to infiltrate vogue’s inside circle for a while, but in addition the tightening grip that tech billionaires have on totally different components of the media. “We already had a script and had been making the film when the rumors [of Bezos considering an acquisition of Condé Nast] began occurring,” The Satan Wears Prada 2 screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna mentioned not too long ago. “It wasn’t impressed by something. However, we did say, ‘Whoa,’ when it occurred.”
The Satan Wears Prada 2 is the most recent in an extended line of movies and TV exhibits to make a plotline out of this shift, which is occurring in plain sight. In Apple TV’s The Morning Present, area journey pioneer Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), who isn’t unsubtly primarily based on Elon Musk, tries to construct a media monopoly to protect his lies. In season three of the HBO finance drama Business, the hapless aristocrat Henry Muck finally ends up making the most of a authorities bailout after operating his power startup, Lumi, into the bottom. In Succession, we noticed the juxtaposition of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), a Murdoch-coded media mogul who pulls the strings of politics and energy, and Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), a new-age tech billionaire who made his fortune in streaming. (The latter’s hobbies included sending his assistant baggage of his blood.)
The sudden rise of those on-screen protagonists displays a real-world actuality. In earlier a long time, we merely didn’t know a lot concerning the 0.00001%. Like royals, they had been extra aloof figures and their interactions with the media tended to be rare, distant and stage-managed. However now, it feels just like the oligarch class are virtually not possible to flee. (I can’t appear to get via a single day with out catching wind of at the very least one of Musk’s social media diatribes). When Donald Trump (a billionaire himself) was inaugurated for the second time in January 2025, what was placing was the brand new squad of tech billionaires – together with Musk, Fb’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s then CEO, Tim Cook dinner, and Bezos (accompanied by Sánchez, after all) – standing in prime place. These males grow to be wealthy and {powerful} by constructing a monopoly on the instruments we rely on to speak, work, entertain ourselves and share data.
Within the Netflix whodunnit Knives Out 2, the egomaniac tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invitations his pals to his non-public Greek island for a murder-mystery recreation that turns into an actual crime. When – shock horror – Miles seems to be a villain, the movie poignantly ends with not solely his status in tatters, however with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa going up in flames. The movie warns us that the ambitions of 1 man can destroy essentially the most priceless human creations.
The Satan Wears Prada 2 is a equally cautionary story. Like many of those billionaire males – as a result of they’re normally males – Benji has little regard for artwork and creativity. “I feel a day is coming very quickly the place Runway doesn’t want fashions, places and even designers,” he tells Miranda, virtually excitedly, within the movie’s most pivotal scene. “It’ll all simply be AI.” Miranda takes the second to defend “magnificence, artistry and the most effective of human achievement”, but it surely feels as if she’s little match for the world that Benji and his fellow billionaires are constructing at a hurtling tempo. The movie asks: is {that a} world we wish to stay in?
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