Nancy Meyers, the director of The Holiday and Something’s Got to Give, knows a thing or two about making movies. And this week, she took to Instagram to protest about a new trend in cinema and TV: on-set photos.
Screenshotting leaked images of actor Jack Lowden dressed as Mr Darcy in Dolly Alderton’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote: “Can we please STOP showing movies and TV shows being made?! I’m closing my eyes. I don’t want to see Mr Darcy getting dressed!” Addressing the fan who originally posted the images, she added: “All the magic is going away! C’mon!”
Unfortunately for Meyers, the removal of movie magic isn’t limited to Mr Darcy. Productions that have recently had on-set images shared online include The Devil Wears Prada 2, And Just Like That and American Love Story, the Ryan Murphy miniseries about Carolyn Bessette and John F Kennedy Jr.
If Sarah Jessica Parker’s JW Anderson pigeon bag spotted on the set of And Just Like That was a “moment”, Margot Robbie on rollerblades filming Barbie in 2023 perhaps cemented the phenomenon. These images spawned online chatter, news stories and memes long before the film hit the cinemas.
This year, the outfits worn on set by Sarah Pidgeon as Bessette Kennedy, were described as “fashion murder” on Instagram, and fashion is the common factor that links these productions – unlike, say, a thriller or a sci-fi film, what characters wear is central to the appeal. This month, images of The Devil Wears Prada 2 characters at a make-believe Met Gala have been pored over on social media.
Henrik Lischke, senior fashion features editor at Grazia, says on-set images are popular with their readers. “Across social and online, the appetite for it is huge. They lend themselves to a variety of content. It’s about the outfits we’ve seen and loved, or these days the internet turns everything into memes.”
For The Devil Wears Prada 2, the ubiquity of the on-set photo itself was fodder for memes – with people screenshotting stars like Selena Gomez to Olivia Rodrigo with the caption “spotted filming scenes for The Devil Wears Prada 2 in New York”.
Amy Odell, fashion commentator and author of a new biography of Gwyneth Paltrow, thinks the frenzy is down to a hunger for female-friendly fashion content in film and TV, which is not satisfied. “There is a dearth of this type of movie or TV show, and people want fashion-oriented things like And Just Like That. A lot of people are hate-watching that, and it’s not a very good show, but I’m going to be a little sad when it’s over … We haven’t had a fashiony show that’s about women’s relationships with one another [for a long time].”
Odell says that while researching her book, people talked to her about “how, when [Paltrow] was filming Shakespeare in Love, efforts were made to remove cameras from the set because they didn’t want photos of her in costume to leak. I’m sure it was much easier to control then.”
These days “you’re going to see on TikTok, you’re going to see it on Instagram,” says Lischke. “Last September in New York, I was in the West Village and bumped into the And Just Like That set. It wasn’t just paparazzi. It was a huge crowd. I ended up filming it and sending it to my family.”
If this is a trend that suits the digital age, it’s not new, says Helen Warner, associate professor in media and digital cultures at the University of East Anglia: “There’s always been an appetite for this kind of material, from the beginnings of Hollywood and the popularity of the ‘film fan’ magazine.”
She says it is part of the way the industry has developed. “[Hollywood has] long since cultivated this kind of ‘parasocial’ relationship with film stars. This feeling of ‘knowing them’ has intensified thanks to the increasing accessibility of these kinds of images”.
Neither Warner nor Odell believe on-set photos will mean fatigue by the time the final product reaches our screens. This bears out with the Barbie example – the film topped $1bn in box office sales.
Lischke, like Meyers, would like to keep the surprise for when he finally sits in the cinema seat. “[The Devil Wears Prada 2 team] will have to get more creative with the scenes that they don’t film out in the open so certain elements of surprises remain,” he says. He names Gia Coppola’s film The Last Showgirl as a good example of when this works, due to a plotline that wasn’t in the trailer. “You were surprised by something entirely new,” he says. “I hope that The Devil Wears Prada 2 is like that – that there are plot twists and outfits we haven’t seen.”