David Frankel, the director who refused to punish Miranda Priestly

David Frankel

Photo: Canadian Film Centre from Toronto, Canada / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 2, 1959 New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Devil Wears Prada, Collateral Beauty, Marley & Me
Awards	Academy Award · Emmy (shared)

David Frankel almost turned down the film that now defines him. Reading the script of The Devil Wears Prada, he felt the story went out of its way to punish Miranda Priestly, the magazine editor at its centre, and he said so before preparing to move on. His manager talked him into a second look. The version he shaped instead, in which the tyrant is also the most competent person in the building, became one of the most quoted studio comedies of the century so far, and two decades later the same character brought him back for a sequel that outgrossed almost everything around it.

That near-refusal says a good deal about a filmmaker whose name rarely travels with his films. Audiences remember Meryl Streep‘s whispered put-downs and Owen Wilson‘s unmanageable Labrador; far fewer could name the man who staged them. Frankel has built a career as a director of actors and of tone, at ease in the narrow space where comedy turns into grief, and he has mostly let the stars take the questions.

He was born in New York City on April 2, 1959, into a newspaper family. His father, Max Frankel, would become executive editor of The New York Times, and his younger brother, Jon Frankel, went on to a career in television journalism. Frankel graduated from Harvard in 1981, and briefly considered following his father into reporting. He chose Hollywood instead, writing scripts and moving into television, where he directed episodes of the sitcom Doctor Doctor and executive produced the series Teech at the start of the nineties.

His feature debut, Miami Rhapsody, arrived in 1995: a romantic comedy he wrote, co-produced and directed, with Sarah Jessica Parker, Antonio Banderas and Mia Farrow, set in the city where he would later make his home. The stranger breakthrough came a year later. Dear Diary, a half-hour pilot starring Bebe Neuwirth, had been rejected by ABC; Frankel and producer Barry Jossen trimmed it slightly and booked it into a single Los Angeles cinema for a weekend. It won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, the only made-for-television pilot ever to take an Oscar.

Television kept him busy at a high level. He directed episodes of Sex and the City and two chapters of the HBO war miniseries Band of Brothers, work that earned him a share of the 2002 Emmy for directing a miniseries, alongside Tom Hanks and the show’s other directors. His pilot for Entourage brought a further Emmy nomination in 2005.

He still had only one feature to his name when 20th Century Fox hired him for The Devil Wears Prada, and he has recalled it as the biggest project he had attempted, with barely enough resources to pull it off. His model was Unzipped, the documentary about the designer Isaac Mizrahi, which treated fashion as silly and serious at once. With screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and producer Wendy Finerman he pulled the story toward the duel between Anne Hathaway’s assistant and Streep’s editor, with Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci circling them. Released in 2006, the film grossed some $327 million worldwide on a budget of roughly $35 to $41 million; Streep won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination.

The run that followed was more uneven than his reputation as a safe pair of hands suggests. Marley & Me, with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, set a Christmas Day box-office record in 2008 and earned nearly $248 million worldwide. The Big Year, a gentle birdwatching comedy with Steve Martin, Jack Black and Wilson, took about $7.4 million against a $41 million budget in 2011. A year later Hope Springs reunited him with Streep, opposite Tommy Lee Jones as a long-married couple in therapy, and critics praised the two leads. In 2013 he made One Chance, with James Corden as the opera singer Paul Potts.

The low point came with Collateral Beauty in 2016. Frankel took over after the original director left the project, and the result, a grief drama in which Will Smith’s advertising executive writes letters to Love, Time and Death and receives answers from actors hired by his colleagues, was savaged: 14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and the weakest opening of Smith’s career. The failure exposed the risk in Frankel’s method. His films lean hard on their casts, and when the material wobbles, the staging does little to steady it. The second Prada did not escape the charge either. Its first trailer drew complaints about flat colour grading of the kind associated with streaming product, and several critics found the sequel softer and less sure of its subject than the original; The Seattle Times called it flat champagne.

Between features he went back to television. He directed the pilot of NBC’s Manifest in 2018, episodes of Apple’s The Morning Show, and the first and fourth episodes of the Netflix series Inventing Anna, a story about a fake heiress that suited his interest in people who perform their own success. Jerry & Marge Go Large, with Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening as a retired couple who find a loophole in a lottery game, premiered at Tribeca and went to Paramount+ in 2022.

Then came the sequel he had once sworn off. Disney began developing The Devil Wears Prada 2 in the summer of 2024, with Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Tucci returning and McKenna writing again. The budget was $100 million, almost three times the first film’s, and Frankel has said most of the difference went to the actors, with basically the same money left for making the movie. Shot in Manhattan and Milan in 2025, it premiered at Lincoln Center in April 2026 and opened on May 1 through 20th Century Studios. It grossed $693.5 million worldwide, the sixth-highest total of the year, and carried the two films past $1 billion combined.

Frankel keeps his private life largely out of view; he made his home in Coconut Grove, in Miami. His father died in March 2025, a few months before cameras rolled on a film about the survival of a print magazine. His next credit is as a producer: he is an executive producer on Pedro Pan, Richie Adams’s drama about the operation that brought Cuban children to the United States, with Andy Garcia, shot in Mexico in late 2025. As for a third Prada, the director who nearly walked away from the first one has stopped saying no. He told Variety he would not rule it out and would jump at more time with those characters; the rest, he has suggested, comes down to timing and the right story.

Tags: American cinema, Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada, The Devil Wears Prada 2, David Frankel

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