We only saw two movies in May, fewer than I'd like, but both were wide-release sequels carrying a lot of brand name and, honestly, not much else. Of the two we covered, this is how they rank. Remember, number one gets the automatic bid into the end-of-year tournament.
2. The Devil Wears Prada 2
I wanted this one to work, because the premise is incredibly strong. Runway is now a dying print magazine in a world of algorithms and AI-driven trends, Miranda (Meryl Streep) is fighting to keep it alive, and Emily (Emily Blunt) has become the luxury-conglomerate executive holding the ad money Runway needs. That setup contains a great movie, and the sequel keeps declining to make it. The biggest miss is personification. Runway should feel like a living thing in decline, visibly changing as its fortunes shift, so that when Andy (Anne Hathaway) starts turning things around you feel it, and when the budget cuts and layoffs hit later, the gut punch lands. Instead the magazine stays an abstraction, the improvements read as plot beats, and the layoffs don't hit the way they should.
The bigger problem is a third act built on Andy doing something the movie spends two hours telling you she wouldn't. She would not try to save Runway by getting into bed with someone who made his fortune in AI data centers, the exact force killing the industry she's trying to protect, and yet the whole climax hinges on it. Route that same beat through Emily, whose corporate maneuvering the film actually establishes, and it works. Tying Andy to it makes her an accomplice in something out of step with who she is, and since the entire resolution rests on that moment, the wobble spreads through the finale. It also flirts with a "good billionaire saves the day" message it never earns.
1. The Mandalorian and Grogu
The winner by default, which is about as excited as I can get about it. It's perfectly enjoyable, the action is fun, everyone stays true to themselves, Grogu is still Grogu and Mando is still Mando, and nothing in it is aggressively bad. The problem is that nothing sticks. You enjoy it in the moment and can't recall its shape an hour later. Nothing here needed a theater. It plays like a feature-length episode, most tellingly when it takes long detours into the deep-lore corners of the Star Wars universe, a twenty-minute Anzellan Die Hard through a Hutt palace here, a half-hour of Grogu tending a poisoned Mando there. On a TV at home I'll extend that patience to a wordlessly cute character. At premium-ticket prices, less so. It sits in the Bullet Train and Atomic Blonde tier of movies you enjoy start to finish and forget the instant they end, which doesn't bode well for a franchise about to hand its future to that same kind of filmmaker.
It gets the edge because its failures are gentler than Prada's. It doesn't break its own characters or rest its climax on a decision that doesn't track; it just fails to justify its own existence, which is the lesser sin. Everyone stays internally consistent, the threads it opens about hunting the Empire's remnants are intriguing enough to want more, and its worst crime is a single moment of plot convenience. Faint praise, but it beats fumbling a good premise.
So The Mandalorian and Grogu takes the automatic bid and The Devil Wears Prada 2 drops to the wildcard round. Worth being honest about what that bid is worth, though: this is a number-one seed by default, the kind a small-conference team earns out of a weak bracket, and whatever it draws next round is probably favored against it. Some months the choice is agonizing. This one wasn't.
