A video Essay? For an adaptation? Groundbreaking.

would have been funny if they changed the content of the lines, but not the structure. "pumpkins? for October? groundbreaking."

Releasing this on the same day as The Devil Wears Prada 2 was announced. Groundbreaking!

I feel like Death Becomes Her works where The Devil Wears Prada fails because DBH doesn't have as many quotable lines that they HAVE to include and is much more interested in luxuriating in its operatic, Faustian themes.

Why not just put the makeover scene before the failure to get a flight during a hurricane? Then the Harry Potter manuscript is a punishment for that.

It actually kind of makes more sense. Because Miranda was angry about missing her daughters' performance. So assigning Andy a task that helps make it up to them is very fitting.

One of my favorite examples of musical adaptation of movies is Matilda. Every choice it makes really elevates the theatricality of the story and I love that the creative had the freedom to make bold choices.rather than sticking tightly to the book and film.

i haven't seen the stage musical so i don't know if it would work in this specific version, but i disagree that the conference room scene *couldn'*t be turned into a musical number in general. it honestly sounds like it would be a really fun song to have various members of the team throw ideas at miranda for her to reject them one by one. plus, being in the middle of the film, it could translate to a great act 2 opener, which are often high energy numbers to kick the show back into gear post intermission.

It really seemed like a betrayal of the original when the entire cast sang Gucci Gang at the end.

So they left out the only scene that shows us Miranda as an intelligent, expert professional instead of some Disney villain.  Groundbreaking.

While lots of people don't particularly like the Mean Girls musical or the 2024 film, i do think the one thing that they have over other adaptaions is that they have all been written by the same person (Tina Fey), so while there are things they know they can't cut because of how iconic they are, she also has an deep knowledge of what the story is saying and what is improtant to keep as is, what can change and what can be cut wholesale without impacting the core story

Love the copy of Lindsay's book hiding on the desk

I don't know how I ended up here but thank you for clearing up this mystery! I've seen the musical but not the film and was baffled by the Harry Potter manuscript plot - up until then Miranda was kind of mean but in a fairly standard "mean boss who had to fight her way to the top" way, as far as I remember, and she wasn't insane, so why she suddenly asked for this completely bonkers thing was really unclear to me. To the point that I was sitting there thinking "is this a lead up to Miranda having to retire because she's got some terrible neurological disease that makes her irrational?" That obviously didn't happen so I was just confused. It being supposed to be a punishment for Andy accidentally intruding makes so much more sense. Thanks!

Gently berating your viewers for not already supporting you genuinely got a laugh out of me 😂 Great job as always!

Really good thoughts on the adaptation and the precise way of writing it.

Plus,. you've introduced me to the coined phrase "cultural cut through" as a way of describing the memefication of a story beat.
That's gonna be in my vocabulary now.

4:01 this bit and "could it be that writers make decisions for reasons???" has been living in my head rent free since i first heard it last week thank you james

What's interesting about this show is that in the movie, Miranda is like this perfect puzzle piece that makes the movie as great as it is. However when it comes to the musical, she's the one drawback. Everyone else is actually pretty fitting for the stage, they're campy and ridiculous enough to break into song and dance. I think Vanessa Williams is doing well in what is a really tough job as an actor. Not only is she playing a character that isn't built for the stage, but she also can't deviate too much from Meryl's original performance, lest the character become unrecognisable. She can't really make this character her own, especially when the script is filled with lines from the film that have to be delivered in the same way in order to land with audiences. I remember when I saw it over Christmas, I could kind of see her toe that line during the show. And honestly if she's relying on her Whilemina memories to do it then I can't blame her, that's a very similar character who is definitely more suited for a musical

Honestly the musical committed the greatest sin of all: having terrible fashion in a Devil Wears PRADA adaptation... Like Andy has a makeover and she ends up looking like a 50 year old Karen hairdresser from the South of France in 2008, this is unforgivable.

Please, please, pleeeeeeeeeeeeease do a video on Legally Blonde: The Musical. It’s one of the best move-to-stage adaptations ever! 😊

Criticising Vanessa Williams for reprising Wilhelmina Slater is a sentence I’d never thought I’d hear.

I think you point about book adaptations is interesting. imo a good novel is hard to adapt into a movie because you have to cut stuff and the books that adapt well have a strong core idea (man trapped in a terroist seige, fall of a tragic hero in a mafia family) that the movie can focus on. "One flew over the cuckoos nest" is an example of an excellent movie that cut half of the source material to become a movie. people adapting literature should adapt short stories not novels for this reason