The incontrovertible fact that legacy movie studios love making movies about their kindred spirits in the legacy media has survived even the collapse of the legacy media. Gone are the days when newspaper movies had something of the spark and spunk of His Girl Friday, Deadline — U.S.A., or — my personal, albeit arcane, favorite — the Torchy Blane series released by Warner Bros. in the late 1930s. In 1976, the film version of All the President’s Men, while artistically formidable, added a note of self-righteous sanctimony that has infected many of its successors, including the relatively recent Spotlight and She Said.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, though, is something else altogether: This is a movie that willingly admits that glossy, snobby, tone-deaf fashion magazines are on life support but imagines that the subject is still sufficiently fascinating to merit a sequel to a 20-year-old movie. Because ticket-buyers have made an unlikely hit out of the sequel, one of two things must be true: 1) there is a heretofore undocumented interest among moviegoers in the struggles of the legacy media; or 2) many millions of people wish to see Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway have a series of passive-aggressive, fashion-related verbal brawls.