This weekend another bride enters the box office arena. Released in 2019, the scrappy genre breakout Ready or Not ran (in mustard-yellow Chucks) to a strong $28.7M domestic finish, cementing its status as a cult hit and a calling card for the bold filmmakers behind Radio Silence—directing team Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. With a signature blend of irreverent humor and gleefully brutal set pieces, the duo relaunched the Scream franchise (2022’s Scream and Scream VI) to great success and brought their comedy-horror sensibilities to the bloody good vampire ballerina thriller Abigail.
Drawing another card from the deck, Searchlight Pictures’ Ready or Not 2: Here I Come doesn’t miss a beat, picking up moments after iconic final girl Grace’s (Samara Weaving) wedding night from hell. As if battling the in-laws wasn’t bad enough, now she must defend herself—and her estranged sister (Kathryn Newton)—from another deadly game orchestrated by ruthless elites hellbent on protecting their pact with ‘Mr. Le Bail.’
Boxoffice Pro spoke with the directing duo, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, about expanding the world of Ready or Not, reuniting their creative team, and cranking up the mayhem in Searchlight Pictures’ Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, in theaters March 20.
2019 feels like a whole other world.
Tyler Gillett: A long time ago. A lot has happened since then [laughs].
Thinking back on that theatrical experience and the journey of releasing the first film. What moments stand out to you?
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: I think for us, the fact that the movie resonated the way it did with people and found an audience is the big standout. When you make anything, you hope that it connects with somebody. To have a movie that was made with so much care and so much love and is so personal—to have that find such a large audience, I think it was unexpected, and we were very grateful for it. That was really it.
What are you most looking forward to with the theatrical release of the sequel?
Tyler Gillett: The goal, even if you go in as a fan of the first movie, is that you will still be really surprised by the characters, the relationships, and the plotting. We really took to heart the things that people loved and were surprised by in the first movie, and we really wanted to make a sequel that preserves and displays that same attitude but isn’t just doing the same thing.
That was really essential to us; if we were going to show up and make a sequel, it really had [to have] a reason to exist on its own. I think we’ve done that, and we’re so excited for people who want more of the Ready or Not feel and world to get to have that in a way that they maybe didn’t expect in this film.
What were those conversations like in the intervening years leading up to Here I Come? The first film came to you as a script that was already done. Were you involved in the storytelling for this second film?
Tyler Gillett: Very intimately.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: Yeah, this was like an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ thing with us, the writers, and the producers. Guy [Busick] and Ryan [Christopher Murphy], the writers, had the idea. I think the genesis was really at the end of the first script in a little tag that they wrote: that there’s a bigger world and there are a lot of families that have this same pact.
From there, they build out this mythology. That was there within months after the first one came out and started to have an audience, so the door sort of opened to the idea that there might be a sequel. That foundation has changed very little in the intervening years—characters have come and gone, [and] the story’s changed a million different ways.
The conversation that we had time and time again was, if we’re going to make this movie, we have to be able to look at each other and the writers and the producers and say, full-throated, ‘This is as good as the first one, or better.’ We do not want to in any way make something that cheapens the first one or takes away from it. We had to be as excited about this one. It couldn’t be just like, ‘Let’s go do it, to do it, because blah, blah.’ And that’s how it ended up getting made—we all really cared.
Improvisation was a big part of the first film. Thank you for giving us Annie McDowell’s “Holy dick” line. How did that sense of play come into making this film?
Tyler Gillett: Yeah, I think that sense of play is an integral part of every movie that we’ve made. So much of that is just casting people that understand the script, the tone, and get what we’re trying to achieve. We had the benefit of having the first movie as something to look at and to reference, right? That took a bit of that challenge out of the equation. It’s casting people that you trust and building trust with them.
Knowing that what’s on the page is important, but it’s not everything. There’s still room to really discover, own, and put your fingerprints on what a performance or a character might be. Some of our favorite bits in this movie, and in all of our stuff, are those things that happen in the moment that aren’t on the page, but you have to have what’s on the page there in order to get those moments. One is really essential and doesn’t exist without the other.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: It’s actually a compliment to how good the script is. That people have an ability to go off script.
Tyler Gillett: Yeah, there’s enough clarity that they go, ‘Oh no, I think that my character might do this.’ We always say that at the end of the process, our goal is to look at everyone in the ensemble and genuinely be able to say, ‘I don’t know what that character would be if someone else was playing it.’ That is just a real desire to have all of these talented people actually bring what’s unique about them to a character. We only ever make ensemble movies. Why are we the only people who have aged over the last seven years? Sam is still flawless.
The whole concept of this world does really open it up to bringing in a very rich ensemble cast. How did you put together this group?
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: White-knuckling it all the way. [There were] limited resources. This is not a giant, throw-money-at-it kind of movie. It’s the exact opposite. It was piece by piece. It started with Sam [Weaving] and Kathryn [Newton], and then from there it was [about], ‘How can we get people that we love and have wanted to work with?’
Shawn [Hatosy] comes to mind; we’ve been fans of his forever. Sarah Michelle [Gellar], we’ve been fans of forever. Elijah [Wood]; I don’t even know what that lawyer character is. He has wiped our brains of whatever person used to be there. That role is such a pivotal role in the movie. Elijah just owns it, and he made it his own.
Everybody who got involved with this movie wanted to be involved with this movie, and they wanted to come hang out in Toronto for a few months and just make something that’s special together. The local cast that we got up there, we can’t speak highly enough of; they all really rose to the occasion. They’re not household names, but they’re so good. It’s that thing we do in every movie, where we’re so excited about making something that people can watch and go like, ‘Oh, that was the first time I saw that person. I love them.’ And hopefully they go on to do bigger and better things.
There was a great gag reel from the first film. What were some of the funniest moments on this set?
Tyler Gillett: We have a gag reel that I think is probably three times as long as the first movie. We blooped a lot. There were many a-bloop on this one.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: Well, we were on nights almost the whole time, so everyone’s a little loopy.
Tyler Gillett: We were also working at a pace that was like—I genuinely feel like everybody involved in the process essentially entered the way that the character Grace enters the sequel. We were just beaten up by the breakneck pace of everything. In a lot of ways, I think that it helps build camaraderie when there’s just this feeling of, ‘Oh man, we have all decided and agreed to try to achieve something that’s impossible, but we’re going to do it, come hell or high water; we’re just all in it together.’ I think that there’s a real sense of buoyancy around the cast and crew because of that declaration. So every day, even our hardest days, were always marked by very loud laughter. It was so much fun. We said it all the time; it feels like we’re shooting a comedy.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: Catherine kicking Sam in the face and Sam yelling ‘Cunt!’ was definitely a highlight.
Tyler Gillett: It was a high-water mark for the bloopers.
Audiences will feel that sense of play and fun all throughout the film. Speaking of the moviegoing experience, I know that, for you Matt, the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland holds special memories. For each of you, what’s an early memory at the theater in this genre that stuck with you?
Tyler Gillett: The Orpheum Theater in Flagstaff, Arizona, is where I first saw Jurassic Park, which was one of the movies that really changed me and made me want to make movies. I think it’s certainly a horror movie in a lot of respects and was one of the scariest, funniest, and [most] thrilling things that I’d ever experienced at that age. I credit that screening with a lot of my desire to get into making films.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: It’s not the genre, but it’s kind of the genre, because I think everything we make is sort of an adventure movie on some level. I’ll always remember one of my earlier filmgoing memories of going to Grand Lake and seeing Back to the Future. I was probably seven or eight, and it was one of those experiences where it opened the door to a whole new world. And you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, this is what this place is?’ For all I know, it was maybe the first movie I saw at Grand Lake.
When you have that theater that you can go to, especially when you’re growing up, having a theater that is “yours,” that you feel is a hangout you can go to with your friends, and you have tons of memories there, it’s just so special, and I hope people still have those experiences.
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