Plenty of sequels flirt with nonexistence, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is no exception. But even if filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett hadn’t gotten the chance to make their upcoming follow-up, they very nearly blew its entire premise on a post-credits scene in the original.
“I don’t think we ever thought of a sequel,” Bettinelli-Olpin told a South by Southwest crowd in Austin over the weekend. “I think we thought we were making it this is one and done.”
The 2019 original starred Samara Weaving as a woman, Grace, who, on her wedding night, discovers that she’s married into a cabal of extremely wealthy satanists. The Le Domas family inform her that she has to survive until dawn while they hunt her down in service of the devil — who they simply refer to as “Mr. Le Bail.” It’s very bloody, very funny and, it’s not a spoiler to say given the sequel, Weaving’s character ultimately gets her final girl victory.
No. 2 picks up exactly where the first left off, revealing that the cabal is much larger (and even richer) than the audience has been led to believe.
“[Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy] had written a scene, a post-credit tag for the first movie, that we just didn’t have the time or budget to shoot,” said Gillett. “It was essentially a bunch of blue bloods, standing at a convention center talking shit about the Le Domas family. Two couples walk into a grand ballroom, and it’s filled with other Le Bail acolytes. The seed of the mythology was certainly planted in that scene and it definitely was rattling around in very bizarre brains of Guy and Ryan.”
Via machinations that are explained during some swift exposition, the expanded universe of satanic one-percenters force Grace into a reprise of the game — this time joined by her estranged sister, Faith, played by Kathryn Newton. Among the actors in their pursuit are Sarah Michelle Gellar (think: a classier and, ostensibly, more murderous riff on Ivanka Trump) and Sean Hatosy (a clear amalgam of the male Trump offspring.) “There’s a lot of idiots in the world that have a lot of power and have children,” said Hatosy. “I could make a few examples…”
Hatosy did not cite any specific examples, but the laughter his remarks got from the audience filled in the blanks.
There’s also a mysterious lawyer played by Elijah Wood and a few others trying to kill Grace and Faith — Néstor Carbonell, Olivia Cheng, Nadeem Umar-Khitab — but Gellar and Hatosy’s Danforth twins are the primary antagonists in a film that relies heavily on actors doing their own stunts. Gellar channels Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a near-perfect recreation of her stake-wielding on the series that made her famous. There are also a lot of practical effects, which is helpful in a franchise in which, it’s no longer a spoiler to say, Because, people tend to explode.
“There’s an excitement on set when you’re using practical effects,” add Gillett. “Everyone gathers around the monitor when Sam and Catherine are about to get shot with the blood cannon.”
The blood cannon gets significantly more use than it did during the original film.
“Everyone looked at me and Sam like we were supposed to be excited about it,” said Newton. “We are getting splattered with goo — no matter how you cut it. And [our] reactions are real, honest. It’s just better that way.”
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is out March 20.
