David Frankel
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Late Night (2019)
Directed by Nisha Ganatra
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Plot Themes Visuals
Similarly, Katherine could be a caricature of a woman, a monster akin to Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, but Kaling’s script and Thompson’s performance give this fictional TV personality real humanity, alternately buoying her with the swagger she’s earned with over 25 years in the business and burdening her with the weight of her mistakes.
While the presence of Emma Thompson raised my interest, I didn’t hope for much more than a cheap The Devil Wears Prada knockoff.
(The number of reviews of Late Night that do not mention The Devil Wears Prada is vanishingly small .)
Kaling has written a movie in the style of old fizz-and-gloss comedies whose passing we now lament, though its most obvious inspiration, The Devil Wears Prada, is barely a decade old.
Late Night owes a significant debt to The Devil Wears Prada (2006), which centers on the relationship between a demanding fashion-magazine editor—Meryl Streep’s indelible Miranda Priestly—and her new, fish-out-of-water personal assistant; it also shares some DNA with the more recent (and much less funny) Trainwreck (2015), starring Amy Schumer as a young journalist dealing with a mean boss and commitment issues.
My affection is also bolstered by the fact that the film gave me low-key The Devil Wears Prada vibes and that I would probably take a bullet for Emma Thompson.
The High Note (2020)
Directed by Nisha Ganatra
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Themes Plot
(A point about workplace sexism also driven home by The Devil Wears Prada and Late Night.)
Los conflictos con su jefa nos recuerdan un poco a The Devil Wears Prada , mientras que el recurso de utilizar el proceso musical como alegoría del romance en puerta es algo gastado que ya hemos visto en ocasiones previas.
The High Note is trying to be a mixture of The Devil Wears Prada and Once, but it doesn’t quite capture the charm of either, as the film lazily hits all the beats of the too-frequently told story of the pressures and sacrifices of becoming a music star.
If it reminds you of "All About Eve" or "The Devil Wears Prada," that's okay because those are good movies for filling time between catastrophes.
Stories of high-maintenance divas and their long-suffering underlings have proved a Teflon comedy-movie staple, whether it’s the Meryl Streep-Anne Hathaway duo in The Devil Wears Prada or Nisha Ganatra ’s last film Late Night , which paired Emma Thompson’s highly strung talk-show host with Mindy Kaling’s bright-eyed incoming writer.
Shift the style-obsessed mean boss from the fashion world of “The Devil Wears Prada” to a style-obsessed mean boss from the music world and you have “The High Note” — except not as funny or insightful.
The September Issue (2009)
Directed by R. J. Cutler
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Themes
For all the speculation and gossip about Wintour and her ice-queen demeanor â sheâs the âdevilâ of the book and film The Devil Wears Prada â the boss here is simply the decision-maker of a huge company.
While Meryl Streep, her screen alter ego from The Devil Wears Prada, is clearly enjoying herself in Julie & Julia, Anna Wintour is on robust form, if perhaps not quite as waspish as we’d want, in The September Issue.
A crisp, elegant English woman in her late 50s, with a trademark bob and giant dark glasses, she was already a legendary magazine figure, before The Devil Wears Prada made her a household name.
Thanks to the Meryl Streep-starring The Devil Wears Prada â a movie in which a high-end fashion magazine is presided over by Streepâs Miranda Priestly, an icy, editorial monster â we probably think we know a lot about Vogue magazine, and its editor, Anna Wintour.
His latest, The September Issue, documents the internal machinery of Vogue magazine as run by its editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour—tastemaker of the fashion world and the inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada’s title character.
There is no mention of "The Devil Wears Prada" — either the movie or the novel on which it was based — in "The September Issue," a new documentary about Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine.
But Hall’s range is more limited, and she is asked to maintain it only for a small portion of the film as compared to the main foil in The Devil Wears Prada.
The Tom Hanks classic Big meets The Devil Wears Prada, but not in a good way, in this lacklustre comedy about a beleaguered personal assistant called April (Issa Rae, best thing in the film), who turns the tables on her domineering company boss, Jordan (Regina Hall), when the latter is magically transformed back into her 13-year-old self (Marsai Martin, having fun).
Little sets the stage with the introduction of Regina Hall’s over-the-top Jordan, a demanding and seriously mean tech company owner who pesters her assistant April, played by Insecure’s Issa Rae, with ridiculous requests in line with how The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly would beckon to Anne Hathaway’s character, which Rae easily comically quips at to herself for the audience’s enjoyment.
She is smart, tough and runs her tech company with such tyranny that she could make The Devil Wears Prada ’s Miranda Priestly look like a pussycat in comparison.
Not unlike Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada .
To establish the terror she inspires in her employees, Little steals a bit from The Devil Wears Prada.
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Directed by Frank Capra
influenced Collateral Beauty (2016)
Themes Plot
Not that this knockoff Hallmark special doesn’t go out of its way to camouflage its ill-conceived intentions as well as the considerable debt it owes to such seasonal chestnuts as “A Christmas Carol” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Intended as a twinkling Christmastime fable, it’s actually a dark perversion of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that replaces divine intervention with corporate fraud, and small-town values with big-city ambition.
Imagine if in It’s a Wonderful Life Clarence hadn’t been an angel but an actor hired by Uncle Billy and then the whole town gathered to redecorate in an effort to convince George Bailey that he shouldn’t kill himself.
In Hollywood, that has led to films from Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life to A Charlie Brown Christmas and Elf.
Directed by David Frankel (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and written by Allan Loeb (“21”), the dramedy aims to be a holiday-season uplift film with an otherworldly component, like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “A Christmas Carol.”
Despite the strange direction the plot takes, this is a film that goes with old school traditional values in the vein of movies like Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, without driving the Christmas holiday or meaning down your throat.
Set It Up (2018)
Directed by Claire Scanlon
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Plot Themes Characters
As the rise of VOD distribution forces an ongoing conversation about what constitutes cinema, Scanlon’s film feels cannily modern in its medium-straddling, even as its storytelling, patchworked from such influences as “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Parent Trap,” breaks little new ground.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: While Set It Up jokes that it’s like an adult version of The Parent Trap, it reminded me way more of The Devil Wears Prada (except as a romantic comedy, and the leads are pulling a “Cher Horowitz” on their bosses).
Some of the movie’s gags seem lifted from Devil Wears Prada directly — Charlie has to complete a science project for his boss’s child; Harper has to return things and make reservations with only the vaguest suggestions of what place her boss is thinking of — and so, if Set It Up isn’t quite as funny as The Devil Wears Prada , it does at least ring truer to life.
Harper (Deutch) and Charlie (Powell) are both beleaguered assistants, trapped in tough gigs serving bosses who don’t understand that “The Devil Wears Prada” wasn’t meant to serve as an instruction manual for unhinged professionals.
Harper is stuck in her own good-natured The Devil Wears Prada story; she is the multitasking slave to Kirsten (Lucy Liu), the czarina of an online sports journalism empire.
In the film, Harper’s boss (Lucy Liu) is a sports journalist who’s shown as someone who’s the best at her job and an actual role model for her young assistant, even when she is channelling Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada.
Working Girl (1988)
Directed by Mike Nichols
influenced The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Plot Themes
It’s a great role for Hathaway, reminiscent of memorable breakouts like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” and Melanie Griffith in “Working Girl.”
“The Devil Wears Prada” might not be much more that a clever riff on “All About Eve,” but thanks to Streep it’s sharp and witty enough to play on a double bill with that 1950 classic and not completely fold in its presence; it’s probably the best Hollywood working-girl comedy since, well, Mike Nichols’ “Working Girl” (1988).
Yet without a single tolerable protagonist or amusingly malicious one-liner – as well as a hypocritical desire to celebrate the hideous Miranda while supposedly condemning her – The Devil Wears Prada primarily makes one pine for any comparable ‘50s working-girl comedy (or, for that matter, 1988’s Working Girl ).
Think of Sigourney Weaver's scheming Katherine Parker in Working Girl: She's such a fiend that no matter what you think of Melanie Griffith's Tess, you root for her.
A blond graduate of Brown in the book, young go-getter Andrea Sachs is now a lanky brunette from Northwestern when luck (mostly good) shoves her into the feng shui/white-on-white corner office of Runway editor Miranda Priestly, here silver-haired and played by Meryl Streep as a cross between Cruella de Vil and the whipcracking sadist essayed by Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl .
Two decades ago we had the story of Working Girl , in which an overworked, underappreciated underling got the respect she deserved as she took down a scheming, nasty boss.
I Feel Pretty (2018)
Directed by Abby Kohn
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Themes Plot
She's Peter from Office Space meets The Devil Wears Prada’s Andy Sachs, a girl who inadvertently frees herself of expectations while navigating a glamorous labyrinth whose inhabitants mostly view her like some sort of Tolkien bridge troll.
The general theme of the film feels cribbed from movies like The Devil Wears Prada, 13 Going on 30, and Big.
It seems I Feel Pretty might take a note from The Devil Wears Prada’s love triangle subplot.
When it comes to fashion satire, The Devil Wears Prada this is not.
The film takes a cue from “Working Girl,” “The Devil Wears Prada” and other Manhattan-set corporate fables.
Much like Anne Hathaway’s down-to-earth character in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Schumer wrestles with the toxic allure of the high-end world in which she works, alienating her friends and jeopardizing her new romance with nice guy Scovel when a fling with Avery’s playboy brother (Tom Hopper) presents itself.
Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)
Directed by P.J. Hogan
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Plot Themes
Based on the novel by Sophie Kinsella but seemingly more inspired by " Legally Blonde " and " The Devil Wears Prada ," the movie strains to follow the tried-and-true formula of a perky fish out of water who is in over her head but with the determination and intelligence to prevail.
Meaning that this story about a New York professional waiting for her career to take off is a cut-rate version of The Devil Wears Prada.
Watching “Confessions” is akin to enduring a Nickelodeon pilot that attempts to cash in on the success of “The Devil Wears Prada” and the “Sex and the City” movie; audiences for the new film are expected to forget everything they know about the media, shopping, writing, the economy and human behavior in general for the plot to work.
Everything about the script is cookie cutter, a reversible wear "The Devil Wears Prada" knockoff that wears out its welcome.
A gloss of “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Legally Blonde” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Confessions” was directed by Brit P.J. Hogan (“My Best Friend’s Wedding”), adapted by Tracey Jackson, Tim Firth (“Kinky Boots’) and Kayla Alpert (“Ally McBeal”) and is at times wildly uneven.
Loosely based on the first two novels from UK writer Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series, Confessions of a Shopaholic is part romantic-comedy and part fish-out-of-water film in a very similar vein to The Devil Wears Prada and How to Lose Friends & Alienate People.
Michelle Yeoh’s work is deserving of the ensuing Oscar buzz in the same way that Meryl Streep deserved her nod for “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Rom-com and culture-clash plot conventions are universal, so why not a PG-rated “Sex and the City” meets “The Devil Wears Prada,” but stocked with solid Asian and Asian-American actors.
Pretty Woman (1990)
Directed by Garry Marshall
influenced The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Plot
It’s a great role for Hathaway, reminiscent of memorable breakouts like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” and Melanie Griffith in “Working Girl.”
Yet, more Pretty Woman than Working Girl , The Devil Wears Prada really lives to give its angel a high-class makeover.
Stanley Tucci takes on the role, which normally belongs to Hector Elizondo (“Pretty Woman,” The Princess Diaries”), as Andy’s mentor and muse and makes it his own here.
Cruella (2021)
Directed by Craig Gillespie
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Plot
Writers Dana Fox ("Isn't It Romantic"), Tony McNamara ("The Favourite") and Aline Brosh McKenna ("The Devil Wears Prada") coalesce, bringing essential vibes from former projects into this one’s duality theme.
Several plot twists later, we find her working for the Baroness (Emma Thompson), the head of a fashion house who seems to be channeling Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada.”
While many who saw the first trailers for the film believed Disney had turned Cruella’s story into something akin to that of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker , the film is actually more in line with a dark, comic-book iteration of The Devil Wears Prada .
(The Miranda Priestly vibes are far from coincidental; Aline Brosh McKenna, who receives a story credit here, also wrote “The Devil Wears Prada.”)
Supporting performances by Joel Fry and Paul Walter Houser (who gave a terrific performance for Gillespie in 2017’s I, Tonya ) as Jasper and Horace respectively, Cruella’s accomplices, and Mark Strong as Paul the Valet (in a role strongly reminiscent of Stanley Tucci’s role in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada ) are excellent.
Stone is terrific in the role, but its Thompson who steals the show, managing to channel both Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada and Daniel Day-Lewis' Reynolds Woodcock from Phantom Thread into a new, deliciously megalomaniacal creation.
The Assistant (2020)
Directed by Kitty Green
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Themes Plot Visuals
Of course there has to be an arc to this character, this milquetoast Hollywood version of assistants we’ve seen in “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Swimming With Sharks,” “The Big Picture” and “30 Rock.”
For those who appreciated the woe-is-me fireworks of “The Devil Wears Prada,” in which a put-upon young assistant pulled back the curtain on her nightmare boss (based, in that case, on Vogue editor Anna Wintour), Green’s approach will feel flat and anti-dramatic.
Written and directed by Kitty Green -- whose experience in documentaries shows in the spare nature of the presentation -- "The Assistant" shares some DNA with movies like "Swimming With Sharks" and "The Devil Wears Prada," which focus on assistants to powerful people in media, and the indignities associated with it.
At times, it feels like watching The Devil Wears Prada be reworked by Ingmar Bergman.
It makes The Devil Wears Prada , with its old-fashioned workplace drama, the force of nature at its center and the lively employee kvetching, look like an exciting place to work.
Swimming with Sharks (1994)
Directed by George Huang
influenced The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Plot Characters
I was reminded of a scene in “Swimming with Sharks” – also an assistant’s tale about the world’s worst boss – in which Kevin Spacey’s blockbuster producer confesses what sent him down such an inhumane path.
This isn’t Kevin Spacey’s screaming lunatic producer in Swimming with Sharks ; this is about the threatening quiet and the sacrifices Miranda makes to be lonely at the top.
The Story In a scene reminiscent of Meryl Streep's grand entry in In a scene reminiscent of Meryl Streep's grand entry in The Devil Wears Prada , the witchy, bitchy Margaret (Bullock) makes her way through the office as her employees cower in terror.
Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a hard-as-nails book editor in the vein of Meryl Streep's iconic Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada .
She's the poor man's Meryl Streep in her role as Margaret Tate, a New York book editor whose introduction tracks that of Streep's in The Devil Wears Prada, right down to the ridiculously complicated Starbucks order delivered by her servile assistant.
As Margaret gets to know Andrew's energetic clan -- especially his mother (the always affable Mary Steenburgen) and grandmother (White) -- she begins to shed her icy exterior and look at Andrew as much more than just a latte-fetching flunky.Bullock initially channels a bit of Meryl Streep's vicious boss in "The Devil Wears Prada" before breaking out of her shell in the film's second act.
"The Proposal" The first sighting of Sandra Bullock as forty-something Margaret Tate, book editor for a major publishing house in New York, is going to make the same impression on anyone who saw "The Devil Wears Prada" as Meryl Streep did.
She�s not in the league of bosses from hell Kevin Spacey in Swimming With Sharks or his female counterpart, Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada.
Burlesque (2010)
Directed by Steve Antin
influenced by The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Characters Themes
Stanley Tucci continues his screen career as male handmaiden to the divas (after The Devil Wears Prada and Julie and Julia), giving a tiresome, rather condescending performance as Tess' gay stage manager.
Since apparently no actual gay actors would take the part, Stanley Tucci assumes the role of Cher's dresser, confidant and world-weary voice of reason, essentially reprising his work in The Devil Wears Prada.
Not that most of the elements of “Burlesque” stand up to much scrutiny – the men are stuck with cardboard roles, with “Twilight” co-star Cam Gigandet as the hunky bartender/frustrated composer, Eric Dane as the not-all-bad real estate mogul with designs on both the club and Ali, and Stanley Tucci reviving his gay-male-Eve-Arden shtick from “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Helping Tess at the club is Sean (Stanley Tucci reprising his fastidious-yet-world-weary major-domo role from "The Devil Wears Prada").
Shades of "The Devil Wears Prada," though in this case we might call it "The Devil Wears Plaster."
In this case, Tucci is back to playing a gay stereotype similar to his character in "The Devil Wears Prada," though the character's sexuality is wisely played down until one unfortunate scene in the last act.
Succession this is not.
Brosh McKenna borrows a bit of plot and scenery from Succession (i.e., all that conniving and dealmaking with Lukas Matsson [Alexander Skarsgård] in Lake Como)…
In that sense, Ritter’s performance channels Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Fashion mavens, and those intrigued by some interesting plot similarities between “Funny Face” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” may enjoy “Fashion Photographers Exposed,” in which 21st century shutterbugs honor the work of Richard Avedon, as well as “The Fashion Designer and his Muse,” a leftover from the last disc and a look at the close creative relationship between Audrey Hepburn and her good friend and lifelong personal fashion designer, Hubert de Givenchy.
That the character works at all is mostly due to Anne Hathaway, who is not only naturally likable, but comes to have a radiance comparable to Audrey Hepburn in Stanley Donen's 1957 musical Funny Face in the latter portions of the film.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
influenced The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
Themes
Top Gun: Maverick is one of the best examples of how to best handle the in-between years from original to sequel.
For every exception like “Top Gun: Maverick” we’re punished by that “Zoolander” update or, much worse, “Caddyshack 2.”