Radio Silence, the filmmaking collective of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, are finally back for more twisted fun and sadistic games in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, the original property that took their careers to the next level back in 2019.
When The Hollywood Reporter sat down with the directing duo three weeks out from their sequel’s March 20 release, they were all smiles. They’re confident in their Samara Weaving-led follow-up, and together with Searchlight, they were eager to screen the film for press over a month out from release, a tell-tale sign of confidence for any movie.
The new installment picks up right where the 2019 horror-thriller left off. Weaving’s Grace MacCaullay is smoking her victory cigarette having just defeated the Le Domas family, her wealthy in-laws for half a day, at their ritualistic and deadly take on hide-and-seek. She quickly collapses from the injuries she’s sustained, and when she awakens in a hospital bed, she’s greeted by her estranged biological sister (and outdated emergency contact), Faith MacCaullay (Kathryn Newton). The bickering sisters are soon forced to work together as Grace’s win over a “High Council family” has triggered a more expansive game of hide-and-seek among four other elite families who are competing to be the head of the shadowy institution that secretly runs the world.
THR last caught up with Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett for their vampire thriller, Abigail (2024), and at that point in time, they were offering their well-wishes to the Ready or Not 2 creative team. While they’d done some writing on the script years earlier, the sequel was fully in their rearview mirror. But they did come home from promoting Abigail with the inspiration to write an original sister story for their Ready or Not star, Weaving, and their Abigail co-star, Newton. Shortly thereafter, they got a call from Ready or Not and Abigail producer, Tripp Vinson, as part of a last-ditch effort to bring them back into the sequel’s fold.
“After Tripp called, we were like, ‘We’re going to steal our own [Weaving-Newton sister story] idea. We’ll pitch it to the gang and see if they like it.’ And they jumped on it,” Bettinelli-Olpin tells THR in support of Ready or Not 2’s March 13 South by Southwest premiere and March 20 theatrical release. “Once that sisterly idea clicked into place, we got super excited about jumping back into Ready or Not 2.”
Everything seemed to be in its right place until Radio Silence were thrown a potential catastrophic curve ball. Ten days before filming was slated to start, Weaving, their battle-tested scream queen, suddenly couldn’t walk. She wrecked her back grabbing a pillow of all things.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been more anxious about the prep of a movie and whether or not it was going to happen,” Gillett says. “Sam couldn’t even move. She was just lying on the floor, and we were all acting as if we were filming a movie in a week and a half,” Bettinelli-Olpin adds.
Luckily, Weaving’s condition improved a few days before the start of principal photography, although she admittedly did much less stunt work than she normally would.
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett also happened to be talking with THR a few hours before Scream 7’s preview screenings on Feb. 26, and unlike the current brain trust of that franchise, they were eager to talk about the ups and downs of their tenure on Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023). At any rate, they believe in the principle that a rising tide lifts all boats, so they were rooting for Scream 7’s box office success at the time. (It has in fact succeeded financially with a franchise-best opening weekend. Radio Silence received contractual/vanity EP credits.)
“What we make is only successful if the things around it are successful. So it’s a good question [as to whether we’re feeling competitive with Scream 7], but we honestly want that movie to crush because it’s good for us,” Gillett says. “If people show up at the theater and watch it, they’ll be more willing to show up to the theater for Ready or Not 2 when it comes out March 20.”
Radio Silence’s Scream films were well-received critically and commercially, averaging $152 million at the worldwide box office. However, there were certainly some speed bumps, such as when they were subjected to a bake-off between their directors’ cut of Scream (2022) and the studio’s preferred shorter cut. Both versions achieved comparable test scores, but when the powers that be looked under the hood, Radio Silence’s cut tested higher in terms of emotional investment. That’s why it became the iteration that made it into multiplexes.
“It was a very bizarre and very scary situation. You go into that game knowing that if you lose, you lose,” Gillett recalls. “So there was a lot of anxiety, and you stake your taste in so many ways on the outcome of that process. It was a rough couple weeks.”
At a particular point in Ready or Not 2, Weaving’s Grace goes toe to toe with another young woman from a council family. I won’t say too much about the character who’s played memorably by actor Maia Jae, but she does have an axe to grind with Grace over something they have in common. There’s enough of a resemblance between Jae and one of Radio Silence’s frequent collaborators that viewers may inevitably wonder whether Melissa Barrera was ever in the mix for the role. She and Weaving both share a couple key commonalities as well. They’ve led a total of five Radio Silence movies between the two of them, and Weaving was originally meant to play Barrera’s role of Sam Carpenter in Scream (2022) and Scream VI. Weaving’s nickname of Sam even inspired the character’s name, so the notion of them brawling in Ready or Not 2 could’ve been some meta fun.
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett are typically game for meta shenanigans, a likely byproduct of helming two meta slasher movies in the Scream franchise. Abigail also subtly included a painting of a distant relative to Henry Czerny’s Tony Le Domas from Ready or Not. But in the case of Barrera joining Ready or Not 2, they indicate it would’ve been too self-referential.
“We love Melissa. We made three movies with her, and we’d make more,” Bettinelli-Olpin says. “We also were conscious of not overwhelming this movie with our stuff. Kathryn was already doing so much of that coming from Abigail. But there’s a version, somewhere, of Melissa [in that role].”
Gillett adds: “Our movies will always have a little bit of that meta language in it, but because Scream is so meta in its DNA, there was a little fear of like, ‘Are we speaking too much outside the world of Ready or Not?’”
Below, during a conversation with THR, Radio Silence also discuss why they aren’t intimidated by the scale of their next film, The Mummy 4, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.
When we last spoke for Abigail, we talked about Ready or Not 2 being in the hands of someone else. You said you hadn’t worked on the script in years, and you wished everybody the best of luck. What happened from there?
MATT BETTINELLI-OLPIN Well, after Abigail, there was a serendipitous turn of events, one of them being that we did not have a job.
BETTINELLI-OLPIN [Abigail and Ready or Not producer] Tripp Vinson called us up and was like, “Hey guys, Ready or Not 2? Would you!?” As we discussed with you, we’d stepped away from it. Tripp then said, “If we can figure it out, schedule-wise, would you guys be interested in coming back to do it in this window?” And we were like, “Yes, but give us a beat because we need to figure out the emotional core of the story.”
TYLER GILLETT Yeah, we re-read the [older Ready or Not 2] script, and we were like, “Fuck, this is good.” But being years away from it, you read things with a fresh-eye approach.
BETTINELLI-OLPIN Then we were like, “What is the in here?” And having just worked with Kathryn Newton on Abigail, we’d already had the takeaway that Samara and Kathyrn need to be in a movie together as sisters. So, as soon as we got home from Abigail, we wrote a script, just to get it out of our system, for the two of them. Then, after Tripp called, we were like, “We’re going to steal our own [Weaving-Newton sister] idea. We’ll pitch to the gang and see if they like it.” And they jumped on it. They were like, “Yeah, oh my God, that’d be great. It deepens Grace as a character and gives us a lot of fun drama here.” The first Ready or Not is such an anti-love story in a lot of ways. You watch that perfect relationship fall apart. And in this one, we were like, “Well, what’s the love story? How do we give Grace a love story? What’s the inverse?” So once that sisterly idea clicked into place, we got super excited about jumping back into Ready or Not 2.
For years, I was one of many that urged Chris Landon and Jason Blum to pair Kathryn Newton and Jessica Rothe in a Freaky Death Day crossover, and they didn’t seize the day. But then you guys came along and created another dynamic duo in Kathryn and Samara. Did the older script have a version of who Kathryn is now playing?
GILLETT There was a sister-adjacent character. We knew that there had to be a new core relationship for the sequel, and we went through a handful of iterations. It was a friend, a police officer and, for a minute, a daughter of one of the family members. So we were circling the notion and the energy of a real central relationship and sounding board for Grace. One of the things we knew and felt when we reread it was it can’t just be Grace on the run again, fighting people in a bigger, badder or bolder way. There needed to be something deeper and more specific to the emotional journey. And there’s a cheat code in the sister character. By and large, it’s so relatable, whether it’s a sister or another family member. We are siblings of sorts, and we also have actual siblings. So you just go, “Oh, right. I can understand, without knowing everything, how a relationship like that could fall apart.” It weirdly needs less explanation while still somehow being more specific, deeper, richer and personal. And knowing that the movie was going to have the pace that it has, there needed to be a bit of a hack to how important and significant this relationship maybe was and then what the wound is for it to have fallen apart.
BETTINELLI-OLPIN It was a light-bulb moment. Thematically, it fits so well. In the first movie, Grace doesn’t have a family [coming from the foster system], and all she wants is a family [of her choice]. To then make the second movie about her reclaiming the family she’d turned away from, we had moments where we were like, “Why didn’t we see this earlier? This just fits. What were we running from then?”
GILLETT It doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you get there.
Samara accidentally gave Andie MacDowell a black eye on the first movie, and she told me a couple months ago that Kathryn avenged Andie on the sequel. What scene led to Kathryn clocking Samara by mistake?
GILLETT It was the sniper sequence. There’s some gunfire, and both of them had to duck and hit the dirt while they’re handcuffed. But hitting the ground together could only be done in a very specific way because they were tethered to one another. So Kathryn went down first with her leg up, and Sam went down right on top of Kathryn’s foot. There’s video evidence of it in the blooper reel.
Sam really had a rough go of it. She also had a last-minute back issue, so how uncertain did things get?
GILLETT I don’t think we’ve ever been more anxious about the prep of a movie and whether or not it was going to happen.
BETTINELLI-OLPIN I would say that we, full stop, were in denial. It was straight-up denial. I should show you a picture. We sat down to talk with Sam and Kat about the movie and the characters and what we’re doing. This was a week and a half before filming, and Sam couldn’t even move. She was just lying on the floor, and we were all acting as if we were filming a movie in a week and a half. We were wondering, “How do we do that if Samara can’t even stand? What could we do?”
GILLETT She only lays down in one scene in the movie. She’s legitimately running at full speed the rest of the movie.
BETTINELLI-OLPIN It was literally within a few days of filming that she just showed up and was like, “Guys, my back’s back! It’s working.” (Bettinelli-Olpin mimics the motion Weaving was making.) We were like, “Don’t undo it!”
GILLETT The way she injured her back was very funny in a way. She was like, “I was picking up a pillow and my back just went out. “
It’s always something stupid like that.
GILLETT Yeah, it’s always just the most everyday, most innocuous thing. During camera tests, we were doing the hair-and-makeup looks and costume looks for everybody. Sam walked out in the dress, and we could tell that she was at 40 percent. She was just so seized up, and we were like, “Fuck, man.” So we prayed to Le Bail [the film series’ supernatural overlord] that she’d pull through, and here we are.
We’re currently talking on the day of Scream 7’s release, and your movie is set to hit theaters a few weeks after it. I know you’re going to say that you can’t wait to see it and that you have many friends over there, but are you still feeling a little competitive?
BETTINELLI-OLPIN I don’t think we’re feeling competitive with it. We both really made peace with leaving the Scream world behind us. And you’re right. We do love a lot of people involved. But we’ve also been so focused on this movie.
GILLETT And we worked with a lot of those same people on Ready or Not 2 in some respect. We want everything in this genre to succeed. There is always something fun to us in the competitive nature of a release. We’d be lying if we said that wasn’t part of the excitement of having a movie hit theaters. It’s the gamification of the movie getting out there and its tracking numbers and all of that stuff. But at the end of the day, it only works if the genre succeeds. What we make is only successful if the things around it are successful. So it’s a good question, but we honestly want that movie to crush because it’s good for us. If people show up at the theater and watch it, they’ll be more willing to show up to the theater for Ready or Not 2 when it comes out March 20.
Part of the reason why you left was because you wanted to make something else first.
