It is a summer of celluloid ghosts, and they are not all returning on equal terms. Antoine Fuqua’s Michael, the meticulously calibrated biopic of the King of Pop, has stormed global box offices, powered by a shrewd corporate alchemy that fuses grief, nostalgia and a carefully laundered personal history. Across the same multiplex corridors, The Devil Wears Prada 2 has stumbled into release as a sequel no one quite requested, freighted with accusations of racial cliché and a dawning realisation that the icy glamour of Miranda Priestly no longer commands the cultural weather. Viewed as a pairing, the two films offer an accidental masterclass in how the entertainment industry metabolises legacy – and how readily audiences reject a feast that tastes of reheated ambivalence.

Fuqua’s film understands the arithmetic of reverence. By placing Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s own nephew, in the title role and closing the narrative in 1988, it seals the singer’s story before ambition curdled into protracted scandal. Analysts in London note the Sony-backed timing: the half of Jackson’s catalogue acquired two years ago for an estimated $1.5 billion grows more valuable with every screen that flickers to the sound of Thriller. From Mumbai, critics observe that what lingers is not merely the music but the spectacle of a childhood sacrificed to rehearsal rooms and a father’s brutality – realities the film validates even as it alters the origins of iconic hits. Spanish reviewers in Buenos Aires and Madrid have methodically catalogued the omissions, above all the erasure of abuse allegations, which renders the film a delicate exercise in what Italian commentators describe as a ‘refresh of consents’. It is a biopic as corporate ritual: the dead hero, divine and unchallengeable, restored to the status of pure product.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, by contrast, commits the aesthetic sin of letting its own disillusionment show. Where the 2006 original was a witty fable of magazine power at its zenith, the sequel arrives as a dirge for a collapsing industry. Across the Atlantic, Parisian critics dismiss it as a poorly customised vintage sack, while in Italy the film has been read not as comfort cinema but as a chronicle of journalism’s fiscal and spiritual crisis. The Runway of 2025 is no longer an Olympus of unassailable taste but a fading masthead cannibalised by clicks and budgets. Meryl Streep’s Miranda hangs her own coat, a quiet reversal that signals the end of the old order more brutally than any scripted monologue.

Yet the most immediate damage has come from a 38-second promotional clip featuring Jin Chao, the new Asian-American assistant played by Helen J. Shen. Her character, introduced as a socially awkward overachiever reeling off academic credentials, has triggered immediate charges of anti-Asian stereotyping from online audiences. Italian film writers call it overt racism, noting that the clumsy nerd cliché feels especially tin-eared in a sequel already struggling to locate a reason for its own existence. The backlash reinforces the sense that the film has misread the cultural moment twice over – first by assuming nostalgia for print-era hauteur, and second by trafficking in lazy archetypes a global audience no longer indulges.

In Buenos Aires, where the avant-premiere drew a constellation of celebrities – Juana Viale, Iván de Pineda, Nicole Neumann among them – the launch party felt like a defiantly glamorous affair at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. Local fashion cycles such as La Jaula de la Moda are spinning off the film’s promotional halo. But even here, actors like Christian Sancho offered philosophically detached remarks on the industry’s limitless, often fickle, nature. None of the red-carpet wattage, however, can conceal the structural frailty at the sequel’s core.

What the divergent fates of these two blockbusters suggest is a market that rewards myth-making over introspection. The Jackson biopic thrives because it transforms a complicated life into a fable of tragic genius, sealed in a vault of nostalgia. The Devil Wears Prada 2 sinks because it insists on showing a dream in ruins, and does so with a tin ear for the very audience it needs. As the northern summer box office shapes up, the lesson for Hollywood is stark: audiences will worship a sanitised god, but they have little patience for a devil stripped of her cloak.