Radio Silence’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is an eat-the-rich love story for sisters. The story picks up right where the first installment left off. Final girl Grace is sitting on the front steps of the Le Domas nightmare mansion, where she just fought for her life and won, lighting a much deserved cigarette.
And that’s exactly where we find her as Ready or Not 2 begins. So how does that work for the directing duo Radio Silence, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, from a pacing standpoint? This is essentially one long movie split into two, and as a result, act one isn't really act one.
“I think a lot of the movie became really clear when we decided the end of the first movie is the midpoint of this story. So let's start the second half of that story just out of a cannon,” explained Bettinello-Olpin. “The first movie is so … There is no off-ramp. It's just so tight. It just moves, moves, moves. It's 90 minutes, and you're out. We wanted to set that tone at the beginning of this movie, too. We are not taking our foot off the gas, this is just going to go. So that opening shot of Sam, we thought it would be a nice way to just take the audience from the thing that they know into uncharted territory and go from there.”
Shot out of a cannon is the perfect way to describe our journey with Grace. Had we not known there was a full feature movie ahead, we would have been lulled into a false sense of security. But judging from the trailers, we knew Grace was in for some incredibly off the rails shit. “There's so much opportunity in that for us,” said Gillett. “The idea that she's just experienced the horrific events of the first movie. And the audience, I think, because there's no off-ramp, really experiences that with her and the feeling of, ‘Man, we've made it. I've survived.’ Then, she was immediately thrown into something even more dangerous, more terrifying, with more obstacles than she's just survived. Honestly, it felt like the kind of test you want to put your heroes through. And Grace is that to us.”
As a mega fan of Ready or Not, Grace instantly became one of my favorite final girls of all time. It is a tough bracket to land in as a newcomer without a massive franchise behind a character. With this second installment, the evils of the powers that be are opened up to a much larger world with truly endless possibilities. Could that mean Ready or Not could become a trilogy or an even larger franchise?
“I think we're open to anything,” Bettinello-Olpin shared. “We didn't think there was going to be a sequel. That never even crossed our minds when we were making the original. When we started working on it with that team [writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy], it became really exciting. Now we were like, this is the end of the story. But we approach every movie like that. This is a full, complete thought. There's no extra stuff outside of it for later. But there's so much. The world is so rich, and the mythology the guys built is so complete that it does feel like if we want to make another one, there's a lot of room to play.”
So even while approaching the movie as a standalone (which is honestly a wonderful answer to hear), the duo is not counting out the possibility for more. And while they're not giving away what that could look like, it sounds like nothing is off the table. “Totally. Honestly, I think there was a lot of anxiety returning to the sequel because I think we certainly hold the first movie very, very dear to us, and we know that it's very dear to fans,” Gillette said.
“We wanted to really show up and try to outdo ourselves and hopefully create something that, for as much as it feels like it has the same attitude as the first movie, but it's a standalone film in a lot of respects,” he added. “If you have seen the first one, the second one is full of great little callbacks and ties, of course, but at the end of the day, watching Grace and Faith run the gauntlet and learn about each other and ultimately learn how to fall back in love with each other, it just felt like a really beautiful sort of singular story that could stand on its own two feet.”
Ready or Not 2 is now in theaters. For more, check out our interviews with the cast — Sarah Michelle Gellar + Elijah Wood to learn about the personal hidden Easter egg Gellar added to the movie. And our favorite on-screen sisters kicking ass and taking names — Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton breaking down their ultimate final girl kill songs.
