Nearly twenty years after Meryl Streep walked into a room and became Miranda Priestly so completely and so permanently that the character has lived in the cultural imagination ever since as one of the most perfectly realized villains in the history of American cinema, she has just told the world something that The Devil Wears Prada fanbase has been waiting to hear since the moment the sequel was confirmed — that she is not coming back to collect a paycheck, not coming back to give audiences a comfortable hit of nostalgia, and not coming back to play it safe with a character that the entire world already loves exactly as she is. She is going all out.

Those three words, delivered with the calm certainty of a woman who has never once in her career done anything less and who knows exactly what all out means when Meryl Streep is the one saying it, have landed on the film’s enormous and devoted fanbase with the particular electricity of a promise that everyone who hears it immediately and instinctively believes — because this is Meryl Streep, because this is Miranda Priestly, and because the combination of those two things operating at full capacity and full intention is the kind of cinematic event that only comes along once in a generation and that the people who love this story have been holding their breath for since the day the original ended. The cast, the director, and everyone who has been anywhere near the production has been saying versions of the same thing — that what is happening on that set with Meryl Streep is extraordinary, that Miranda Priestly in this sequel is something nobody fully anticipated, and that the audience thinks they are ready for what is coming and is very lovingly, very completely mistaken.