Gird your loins, Miranda Priestley is making a comeback. As is the rest of the Devil Wears Prada cast who are currently filming the sequel in New York City 20 years after the original film came out. If this is news to you then you must live a phone-free existence. Social media has been inundated with behind the scenes (BTS) content all summer, despite the film not arriving in cinemas until 1 May.
Between Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Emily (Emily Blunt) and Miranda (Meryl Streep) reuniting outside an office building, online ‘It’ girl Amelia Dimoldenberg being spotted on set and a funeral scene in Central Park (is this Colin Firth on the set of Bridget Jones all over again?), the plot drip feeding has the internet divided. For some, the spoilers are inescapable, and it ruins the fun. For others, it only adds to the excitement.
While ‘BTS footage’ dates as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960, in a world of iPhones and Instagram it’s taken on a life of its own. From Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and the final season of And Just Like That last summer to Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson reunion on the set of Happy Hours and Lena Dunham’s next romcom Good Sex, the past year has seen a cultural shift in the amount of BTS content circulating online.
We’ve become accustomed to microdosing plot points, outfits and new characters before the projects are even in the can. It's no longer enough for films to grab our attention at the box office – as the drama behind the scenes of Don’t Worry Darling in 2022 or Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson’s alleged romance PR stunt on the press run of Naked Gun serve to prove – viral hype has become an essential marketing tool.
The question, then, is are the studios in on it? Devil Wear’s Prada 2, for its part, has been filming under the codename ‘cerulean’ – a nod to the infamous scene where Miranda compares two ‘identical’ blue belts – which wouldn’t be a hard one for super fans to crack. However, a New York based paparazzo who’s shot Spider Man, And Just Like That and The Morning Show throughout his 15-year career, says they’re not. ‘Studios never tell us,’ he explains. ‘They’re very strict about that.’
It's easy to forget two things: that camera phones and social media have irreversibly changed how we consume and engage with cinema, and that all the projects mentioned were filmed in large, busy cities. Not only that, but most of the footage shared by the public on TikTok and Instagram was filmed outside. ‘Devil Wears Prada did eight to 10 days exteriors in Manhattan and there were at least 10 photographers on set every day,’ he continues. ‘The crew, the security guys, they know all of us and they work with us very well.’
Noel Calingasan, who runs the Instagram account @NYClovesNYC, chanced upon the set after a dentist appointment. ‘I went to Rockefeller Center to cool off because it was a hot day and realised it’s not far from 1221 Avenue of the Americas, and true enough there was a big crowd. I love the first movie so I decided to stay and see if I could get some footage.’ Fellow New Yorker Mari who runs the account @newyorkerposts also keeps her nose close to the ground. ‘Usually there are signs in the street saying they’re going to film in that location, the day, which streets will be closed and where you can’t park and people see the signs and post them on an X account called @OLV [On Location Vacations].’ Incidentally, the paparazzo uses this account too.
‘The X account was a website I started almost 20 years ago when there wasn’t social media, and we were the only people sharing this type of information,’ Christine M. Bord, who runs @OLV, reveals. ‘But now there are so many people following this stuff and sharing it on social media it’s becoming more normalised. I get an average of 10 messages a day with information.’ Once in a blue moon she’s invited on set by a studio or tipped off by a crew member, ‘but in general, no, it’s really more grassroots’.
When it’s spoiler-free, social media content can be mutually beneficial and even play into the distributor’s hands, but it can be a headache for film crews trying to keep major plot points under wraps. While fixing locations for the finale of Gavin & Stacey, James Corden and Ruth Jones rewrote the ending to have Nessa depart from Southampton Docks instead of an airport in fear of fans finding them. The phalanx of fans who regularly lined Trinity Street on Barry Island, where the titular couple live, suggest that was a smart idea.
According to Bord, the feverish, nostalgia-fuelled excitement about Devil Wears Prada 2 is still unusual. ‘I felt like, oh my gosh, things are back. It’s really exciting. There are always TV shows and movies people are interested in, but not like this.’
Even so, it can be disruptive. One clip on TikTok shows Hathaway pleading with the paparazzi in Central Park to let them film in peace. ‘Does everyone know there are children on set today?’ she asks. ‘So everyone’s going to relax and we’re going to have a very nice day.’
However, the paparazzo insists anything we see pre-emptively must have been approved by the powers that be. ‘If there’s something they didn’t want us to get like a spoiler or a certain outfit, they wouldn’t do it where we can get it. Nobody ever gets the stuff Marvel wants to hide and there’s never a problem.’ And while the crews don’t invite him on set, per se, he believes ‘from a studio standpoint, they kind of like the fact we’re there because we’re giving the movie advertising before they get a trailer out’.
Love or loathe it, it’s hard to imagine a world in which blockbusters can be made in major cities populated by super fans without this happening. Even filming in the middle of the night – as they regularly did for Mad About the Boy – is not enough to deter cinephiles and fortuitous passers-by from getting their shot. It sounds like the safest way to avoid spoilers in 2025 is to stay offline. That’s all.
Nikki Peach is a writer at Grazia UK, working across entertainment, TV and news. She has also written for the i, i-D and the New Statesman Media Group and covers all things pop culture for Grazia (treating high and lowbrow with equal respect).