There is a specific kind of excitement that happens when two things you love collide in a way that makes absolutely no logical sense and yet feels completely inevitable. M&M's and The Devil Wears Prada. Candy and couture. A Mars, Inc. product tie-in and the most quotable fashion film of the 21st century. This is where we are right now, and honestly? I'm not mad about it.
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The M&M's x Devil Wears Prada 2 candy collab dropped this week just as buzz for the long-awaited sequel is hitting a fever pitch — and the internet has opinions. So do I. Let's get into it.
Introduction
In the weeks leading up to the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, the marketing machine has been running at full Runway-magazine speed. We've seen the trailers, the cast reveals, the think-pieces about what it means that Meryl Streep is back as Miranda Priestly in 2026. (If you want the cultural deep-dive on what Miranda means now, our culture desk covered it beautifully — Miranda Priestly 2026: What the Icon Means Now is essential reading before you see the film.)
But Mars, Inc. apparently decided that trailers and press tours weren't enough. What this sequel really needed was a limited-edition candy collaboration — specifically, M&M's redesigned in the visual language of high fashion, runway drama, and the color palette of a Parisian editorial shoot. The result is a product that is equal parts snack food and cultural artifact, and it is being talked about everywhere from TikTok food accounts to actual fashion publications.
The thing is, this is not just a fun little tie-in to scroll past. It's a window into how candy brands are repositioning themselves as lifestyle products, how movie studios are monetizing nostalgia in increasingly creative ways, and what it means when a beloved film property gets the full pop-culture-industrial-complex treatment. There's more to unpack here than a bag of chocolate lentils, I promise.
What's Actually in the Bag
Let's start with the candy itself, because that's where I always start. The M&M's x Devil Wears Prada 2 limited edition features the brand's classic milk chocolate shells in a color palette that ditches the familiar primary rainbow in favor of something distinctly editorial: deep runway black, icy cerulean blue (a nod to that iconic cerulean monologue), and a sharp, cold white. The packaging is sleek — matte black with gold foil typography, the kind of thing that looks more like a perfume box than a candy bag.
There are reportedly also custom-printed M&M's featuring tiny fashion illustrations: a stiletto, a pair of oversized sunglasses, a stack of magazines. It's the kind of detail that makes you slow down when you pour them into a bowl. I've made this kind of observation maybe thirty times covering food collabs, and the ones that get the details right — the ones that feel like the designers actually watched the movie — always generate more genuine enthusiasm than the ones that just slap a logo on a package.
The candy is available in a standard bag and a larger collector's tin, with the tin reportedly retailing around $18 to $22 depending on the retailer. The standard bags are hitting Target, Walmart, and major grocery chains this week. The tin is being positioned as a collector's item, which, knowing how these things go, means it will be on eBay for three times the price before the end of the month.
Why This Collab Makes Surprising Sense
The first time I heard about this, I laughed. And then I thought about it for about thirty seconds and realized: this is actually kind of genius.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is, at its core, a film about consumption. About wanting things. About the seductive pull of beautiful objects and the cost of acquiring them. The original film grossed over $326 million worldwide on a $35 million budget, and it has never really left the cultural conversation — it streams constantly, it gets re-referenced every fashion week, and its dialogue has been memed into something approaching mythology.
And honestly, M&M's is a brand that has always understood that candy is emotional before it is nutritional. You don't eat M&M's because you're hungry. You eat them because they're there, because they're fun, because the colors make you feel something. There's a reason Mars has been leaning harder into limited-edition and collaboration drops over the past several years — it's the same reason Supreme puts their logo on a brick and sells out in minutes. Scarcity plus cultural relevance equals desire.
The Limited Edition Economy
Mars, Inc. has been accelerating its limited-edition strategy since roughly 2019, when the brand started noticing that special releases generated social media engagement at a rate that dwarfed their standard product line. Their M&M's Flavor Vote campaigns, their holiday specialty colors, their pop-culture tie-ins — each one functions as a media event, not just a product launch.
According to market research firm Circana (formerly IRI), limited-edition candy and confectionery products generate an average of 23% more social mentions per dollar of marketing spend than their standard counterparts. The scarcity signal does real work. When you know something is going away, you want it more. Miranda Priestly would understand this instinctively.
The Nostalgia Industrial Complex Is Working Overtime
Here's the context that matters: The Devil Wears Prada 2 is arriving eighteen years after the original. The audience that made the first film a phenomenon is now in their late 30s and 40s — a demographic with disposable income, deep nostalgia, and a proven willingness to spend money on things that make them feel something.
Studios have learned, slowly and then all at once, that sequels to beloved films aren't just movies. They're nostalgia delivery mechanisms. And the way you maximize the return on a nostalgia delivery mechanism is to build an entire ecosystem of products, experiences, and collaborations around the release. You don't just sell a ticket. You sell a tin of M&M's, a Spotify playlist, a limited-edition magazine cover, a TikTok filter.
Disney has been doing this for decades. Marvel turned it into an art form. Now legacy films — the ones that weren't necessarily franchises but became cultural institutions — are getting the same treatment. And the M&M's collab is a smart piece of that puzzle, because it puts the movie's visual identity in the snack aisle, in the hands of people who might not be actively thinking about the film but who will absolutely pause when they see that matte black packaging.
Who Is This Actually For?
The honest answer: it's for everyone who has ever quoted "Is she or isn't she?" at a dinner party. It's for the person who watched the original film in a college dorm room and felt something shift in them. It's for the fashion-obsessed and the movie-obsessed and the people who just really like M&M's and appreciate when a candy bag looks like it belongs on a coffee table.
My friend Claudia — who has seen the original film somewhere north of fifteen times and once named her cat Nigel — texted me a photo of the tin the moment she spotted it at Target. Her message was three words: "I bought two." That's the target consumer. That's who Mars is talking to. And they found her immediately.
What the Fashion World Is Making of All This
The reaction from fashion-adjacent media has been, predictably, a mix of delight and mild condescension. Several fashion editors have posted the packaging on Instagram with captions that are affectionately ironic — the tone of someone who finds something charming while also being slightly above it.
And look, I get it. There's something inherently absurd about a candy brand cosplaying as haute couture. The cerulean speech — the one where Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly explains to Anne Hathaway's Andy that her "I'm above fashion" cerulean sweater was actually chosen for her by the industry she's dismissing — is literally a monologue about how commerce shapes culture without us realizing it. The irony of using that film to sell candy is not lost on anyone paying attention.
But here's the thing: food and fashion have been in conversation for a long time. Moschino put fast food imagery on the runway in the '90s. Jeremy Scott made McDonald's-inspired pieces for Adidas. Collabs between luxury aesthetics and mass-market products aren't a corruption of fashion — they're a conversation fashion has always been having with popular culture. The M&M's tin doesn't cheapen the film. If anything, it extends its reach.
How This Fits Into M&M's Bigger Reinvention
Mars has been quietly but aggressively repositioning M&M's for the past several years. The brand faced significant backlash in early 2023 when it temporarily "paused" its spokescandies following conservative criticism about the redesigned female characters — a PR moment that was widely mocked but also demonstrated how emotionally loaded the brand had become.
Since then, Mars has leaned into cultural relevance as a strategy. They've done collabs with musicians, athletes, and now film franchises. They've released specialty flavors tied to cultural moments. They've invested in packaging that photographs well — because in 2026, a product that doesn't photograph well is a product that doesn't market itself.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 collab is, in this context, a signal of where M&M's wants to be: not just a candy you eat at the movies, but a candy that is part of the cultural moment the movie represents. It's a meaningful distinction. And if you want to see another food brand doing something similarly interesting with nostalgia and identity, the piece I wrote on Dairy Queen's new breakfast menu covers some of the same territory from a very different angle.
Does the Candy Actually Taste Good?
I would be a bad food writer if I didn't address this. I got my hands on a bag, and here's the honest answer: yes. They taste like M&M's. Which is to say, they taste like the specific pleasure of a thin chocolate shell giving way to creamy milk chocolate, with that faint waxy sweetness that is somehow exactly right every single time.
The color change doesn't affect the flavor — they're still classic milk chocolate, not a new formulation. If you were hoping for a cerulean-blue white chocolate variety or a runway-inspired dark chocolate, you'll be mildly disappointed. This is a packaging and aesthetic play, not a flavor innovation.
But here's what I will say: pouring them into a bowl, those deep blacks and icy blues and sharp whites, they look genuinely beautiful. There's something about the restrained palette that makes you slow down. I ate them more slowly than I normally eat M&M's, which is saying something, because I've been known to go through half a bag while writing a single article. I kept picking them up and looking at them before I ate them. That's not nothing. That's design doing its job.
The Bottom Line
The M&M's x Devil Wears Prada 2 collab is, on one level, a piece of movie marketing dressed up as a snack. But on another level — the level I find more interesting — it's a case study in how brands and studios are learning to speak the same language. The language of limited editions, of cultural moments, of products that function as signals of who you are and what you love.
Mars didn't just put a movie logo on a bag. They understood the visual grammar of the film well enough to create something that feels like it belongs in that world. The matte black tin, the gold foil, the cerulean nod — these choices were made by someone who watched the movie and took notes. That care shows. And in a world where most collabs feel like they were generated by an algorithm matching two brand names, care is actually rare.
When I finished the bag — yes, I finished the bag — I felt that particular warm satisfaction that comes when something delivers exactly what it promised. Not surprised, not disappointed, just genuinely pleased. The M&M's tasted like M&M's. The packaging looked like a love letter to a film that a lot of us have carried around for eighteen years. And for a Tuesday afternoon snack with a deadline looming, that was more than enough.