Anne Hathaway is doing everything right. Magazines, TikTok videos and the most erudite critics show it daily. Audiences love her. Social media loves her. But the point is she hadn’t been doing anything wrong before, not exactly. Yet back then the public hated her. The internet hated her. The world turned against her. Still, this year the American actress is releasing five films; among them are two of the year’s biggest box-office hits, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey. This Friday her fourth project, The End of Oak Street, a dinosaur movie set in the American suburbs, opens in Spanish cinemas. Ten years ago, that Hathaway would have been eaten alive by social media, the screen snobs would have ridiculed her, and the box office probably would have crushed her. But a decade has passed and everything has changed—for audiences, for ticket sales and, above all, for her.

This 2026, Hathaway, 43, faces the most demanding year of her career. The actress herself has said it is something that will probably never happen again and that she had to be very prepared for it. She planned it carefully, from the moment scripts began to rain in and turned into shoots, now rounded off with immaculate promotional campaigns that will run through awards season in the first quarter of 2027. This year has also brought an extra flourish to show the world more than her impeccable work: the happy progress of her personal life in the form of a pregnancy she announced in June. That news rounded out her carefully calculated comeback. She made that clear in an interview with The New York Times at the start of her unstoppable season, laughing—her best promotional tool—saying: “Before then, I was like, I’m not ready as a person. I’m not ready as an artist. I need to develop more, otherwise I’m just going to get eaten alive.” She knew what she was talking about, having been subject to that cannibalism a decade earlier.

A small film was followed within a week by a giant: the long-awaited sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, in which she returned to what she has said is one of the roles people most identify her with on the street, Andy Sachs—the awkward, deeply human subordinate to the icy Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). The flawless chemistry worked again, backed by a brilliant global, big-budget promotion, and the box office rewarded the film with $700 million (about €606 million).

That is a lot of millions, but not as much as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which has grossed $1.2 billion in less than a month (€1.04 billion). After years of wanting to, Hathaway finally worked with Nolan again, more than a decade after Interstellar (2014), which marked a shift toward a more powerful image for her after her more vulnerable role in the film adaptation of the musical Les Misérables, for which she won the Oscar for best supporting actress in 2013.

Now comes The End of Oak Street, an adventure film co-starring Ewan McGregor, which she primarily shot because she wanted to work with director David Robert Mitchell, she told Europa Press at the premiere. Her pregnancy has progressed, but she shows no sign of stepping back: she has kept joking on social media and visiting sets with McGregor in recent weeks. And she still has Verity, due in October, a thriller about a successful writer who, after an accident, is replaced by Dakota Johnson.

The actress has mixed projects shrewdly: indie, crowd-pleasing pop, the big auteur picture, family fare, and horror. In The Devil Wears Prada 2 she shares the screen with Streep and Emily Blunt. In The Odyssey she shines within a more global cast. In Oak Street she traded scenes with McGregor. And in Mother Mary, the quieter promotion has been squarely about her. So much variety and volume don’t seem to tire an actress whom, just a decade ago, Hollywood chose to hate without a clear reason—and who now laughs for photographers every day.

Perhaps there is the key, as corny as it sounds: Hathaway has moved from smile to laugh. Before, she smiled discreetly. Now she freely laughs in interviews, at photocalls, even at herself. It all began when she won the Oscar for Les Misérables, a grueling role. She told The Guardian she did not feel the expected “uncomplicated happiness” when she went up to collect the statuette after a part that required fasting, losing 11 kilos and shaving her head; at the time she seemed to apologize at every turn. Her remarks always came off as politically correct. She said, for example, about the Oscar: “I felt wrong that I was standing there in a gown that cost more than some people are going to see in their lifetime.” She was wearing a custom Prada valued at €70,000 and a necklace worth €8.6 million—expensive like any star’s, borrowed like any star’s.

That somewhat naïve Hathaway irritated an industry that was changing. When traditional outlets lost clout and fans’ comments, social media and blogs gained influence, she didn’t fit the good-girl profile her publicists were trying to sell. Her chemistry with the public broke. The so-called ‘Hathahaters’—as her critics labeled themselves—arrived.

Facebook pages criticized her, and for every remark she made there was a mocking tweet. That strange and ungrateful hatred fueled analyses and TV shows. She admitted, perhaps naively, perhaps seeking peace, that it affected her. As Carolina Bermudez—then the host of CBS entertainment program The Couch—said around 2013: “Right now, there isn’t anything that Anne can do that won’t be scrutinized. Her best option is to just go away for a bit, perhaps take a long needed vacation and let the critics find another person to vilify. It doesn’t take long in Hollywood!”

And that’s what she did. She didn’t go on holiday, but she shifted the focus. She got through the 2010s with many projects, not all of them acclaimed. The plan wasn’t to disappear but to be more calculated about her presence. She told The New York Times she thought she was “in the small, weird indie section of my career”and that the big roles wouldn’t return—until a couple of years ago when two films changed the script for her career.

On one hand, the romantic The Idea of You, a streaming hit in which she plays a 40-year-old who falls for a twenty-something musician, which raised her profile with younger generations. On the other, what she described as one of the most complex roles of her career, Céline in Scenes from a Marriage with Jessica Chastain, which put her in a complicated place regarding motherhood. By then she was speaking openly about the ‘Hathahaters’: “A lot of people weren’t offering me roles because they were very worried about how toxic my internet identity had become,” she told Vanity Fair.

Now Hathaway is back. After this busy 2026, next year she will release Princess Diaries 3, in which she will reprise her popular character Mia Thermopolis. This Sunday she will be named a “Disney Legend,” a title held by stars such as Julie Andrews, Miley Cyrus, Elton John and George Lucas, among others.

Everything has added up: her political engagement with the Democrats, where she calls for votes with humor and pop-culture references; her increasingly refined personal image—elegant but resolute (she didn’t hesitate to show her pregnant belly at the Oak Street premiere, grabbing headlines); and a youthful face have put her among the most admired. She no longer measures her words so carefully and her candor is upfront, as candid as a star can be within Hollywood’s orchestrated machinery. This week, asked about her baby’s sex on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, she said she knew but wouldn’t reveal it. “Thanks for the support, I always feel so rude saying this,” she said with a big smile. The crowd, far from taking offense, cheered. Not a single ‘Hathahater’ remains in her path.

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