So much Annie

Nobody here is bitching about all the Anne Hathaway content we’ve had this week. I love her, and we’re getting more of her. Not just in the news this week but with the work she has coming down the pipe. 

First, the Vogue cover story, all in service of promoting her upcoming film, Mother Mary, in which she plays a popstar, like at the level of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift. This is an A24 feature, shot last year, and a first look was shared back in November 2024. You can see why Anne’s character is being compared to those icons – this costume seems to be inspired by Beyoncé at the Grammys in 2017 when she was pregnant with the twins. Mother Mary is the title of the film, that may also be a connection. 

The role then, and obviously, requires Anne to sing, and we know she can sing, she won an Oscar for her performance in Les Misérables, in which she sings a lot. And she can sing live. What’s curious to me, though, is that this isn’t mentioned in the Vogue story. Her Oscar doesn’t even come up, not once. And when someone wins an Oscar, it always accompanies their name. But the whole point of the piece, meant to introduce Anne in her Mother Mary era, is that in order to become Mother Mary, she had to start from scratch. 

They’re saying it’s her most challenging role, this snapshot of presumably one of the most famous women on the planet going through some kind of crisis and reaching out to the fashion designer, played by Michaela Coel, who helped her create her own image and legend. Apparently most of the film, directed by David Lowery, takes place in a barn between Anne and Michaela, with stage performances interspersed as flashbacks. 

Anne and everyone else involved in the film, and also the writer of the Vogue piece, Maya Singer, repeatedly talk about the fact that the film is weird, almost inaccessible. Also Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff wrote the music – which wasn’t ready until after the barn scene was filmed. But there’s also an air of mystery about it, as Maya describes, “… there’s a general air of “What happened on Mother Mary stays on Mother Mary.” So the messaging right now appears to be that this is a big swing artistically, that we’re about to see Anne Hathaway as we’ve never seen her before. And we might not like it because it’s so twisted but we also might LOVE it because, well, Anne Hathaway is playing a popstar! And the looks will be insane!

I’m not mad at it, the way they’re spinning the intrigue and at once setting and also managing expectations. What is curious is that even though she’s landed such a high profile cover with the purpose of promoting the film, Mother Mary does not have a confirmed release date. Is Anne in Vogue supposed to help with that and drive anticipation? The way Maya is writing about it, it sounds like she’s seen it, so presumably the film is finished, so it’s interesting that A24 has yet to confirm when they’ll roll it out. In the back half of 2025, A24 has two highly anticipated releases on the schedule, both directed by Safdies: Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, starring The Rock (and it’s very possible he’ll campaign for an Oscar nomination for this) and also Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, going for back-to-back nominations. It could be that they’re still strategising with how to coordinate all these projects and their resources. 

While we don’t know yet when Mother Mary will be in theatres, we do know that The Devil Wears Prada 2 is scheduled to release in May 2026 and they’re heading into production. Which is why there was a flurry of casting announcements yesterday. Annie, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci are all returning. New cast members include Lucy Liu (!), Kenneth Branagh, Justin Theroux, Pauline Chalamet, BJ Novak, and … Simone Ashley! As they say, this is f-cking STACKED. 

Annie could have easily covered Vogue for The Devil Wears Prada 2. And the cute Vogue videos she did with Bowen Yang are giving more Devil Prada energy than they are Mother Mary energy. Not that one cover story can’t work for both movies. Fashion is obviously its own character in both stories – one about a popstar and the other about the fashion industry. And, most importantly, both add up to a lot of Anne Hathaway fashion, almost a whole year of it. 

We win!

 

Attached – Anne out and about in New York yesterday.  

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