Sorry 'Ready or Not 2' Fans, but the Crossover You Want Isn't Happening

Samara Weaving’s Grace MacCaullay (Le Domas) just dismantled the counsel of families who ruled the world, and now she just really needs a cigarette. To celebrate the return of two of horror’s most exciting voices today, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sat down with the Radio Silence duo to talk all things Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.

In this interview, the directors discuss how they collaborated with Ready or Not writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy on discovering the “heart” of their highly anticipated sequel. Picking up right where Ready or Not left off, the team needed a way to “challenge the notion of what the first movie was,” and it just so happens that they found their answer on the set of Abigail. Here I Come introduces fans to a hilarious and surprisingly heartwarming surprise in Kathryn Newton’s Faith, the kid sister Grace outright lied about in the first movie. Now, the two have to work together to outsmart and outlast Mr. Le Bail’s most loyal subjects, with six — well, four — families vying for full power.

Check out the full conversation in the video above, or the transcript below, where Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett discuss the essential inclusion of Newton’s new character, their favorite shots in the film, crafting the Battle of the Brides, and if Ready or Not and Abigail are a shared universe. They also tease what we can expect from their take on Brendan Fraser’s return to The Mummy franchise and when they begin filming.

'Ready or Not 2's Kathryn Newton Became the Key to Unlocking the Sequel

"It was something we were kind of chasing."

PERRI NEMIROFF: With Abigail, I know that you guys played around with things in the development phase a little, so it made me want to bring back this particular question. What would you say is the biggest difference between draft one of this screenplay and the finished film that everybody is seeing and loving now?

MATT BETTINELLI-OLPIN: Kathryn Newton's character, right? Full stop.

How so?

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: She wasn't in any of their early drafts.

TYLER GILLETT: There were multiple versions of, like, a central relationship.

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: Yeah, and it was something we were kind of chasing.

GILLETT: We knew we needed, like, a heart.

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: We, the writers, the producers, were kind of chasing the whole time of, the first one is such an anti-love story with Alex and Grace, how do we have something that equals or surpasses that? And I think we'd actually talked about a sister really early on and kind of threw it away for some reason. Then it was when we were working on Abigail that we were like, “Oh, Kathryn and Sam need to be in something together.” So, it just all came together on this.

GILLETT: I remember it being that there was a fear about retconning, and then the idea was, well, fuck that, what if it's actually complicated? That Grace lied? She was lying to her new family. She's lying to the audience when she said, “I don't have a family.” That, to us, was just so much more interesting. And it also, I think, in a lot of ways shaped our ethos in approaching this, that we couldn't be overly precious about anything that the first movie did. We say that obviously loving it so dearly, but also knowing that for a sequel to work, it had to challenge the notion of what the first movie was in some ways, and hopefully expand on our understanding of who Grace is as a character.

It's nice to see her have some flaws.

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: Yes! She's so perfect in the first one.

‘Ready or Not 2’ Directors Wanted To Push Boundaries With This Fight

Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett break down their Battle of the Brides.

Digging into your many epic set pieces, going into filming, which one did you think was going to be the toughest to pull off during production, and ultimately, was it, or did a different one catch you by surprise?

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: I feel like the bride fight.

It’s so good!

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: Not necessarily… I mean, it was tough to shoot, but I think for us, it’s more of a tonal thing, right? We kind of backed ourselves into a corner and said, “We have to be able to make this work tonally. We have to have to.”

GILLETT: The cross-cutting between those two fights.

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: The brutality and the fun.

Was the plan always to cross-cut those? I found that to be such an interestingly effective choice, and I couldn't quite put a finger on why they paired so well together.

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: Yes, it was.

GILLETT: And while in the script they were sort of cross-cut, it was written with cutting in different moments, and we played around. I mean, it's probably the most edited scene in the movie in terms of the amount of time and effort put into the conceiving of the balance of those things. Literally, up until the sound mix, we were on the stage mixing and making changes to that sequence, because of what Matt said: it was so integral to defining the tone of the movie.

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: You have to, at the end of that scene, feel like we may have gone too far without feeling like, “I don't like this movie anymore.” And it was finding that incredibly thin line to walk that we were just trying to get to the whole time.

This is a little bit of an unfair question, but because I think so much of your movie is absolutely stunning, do you each have a single favorite frame of your film?

GILLETT: I have one. My favorite frame is the shot before Le Bail appears at the end of the movie. It's a three-shot of Sam, Kathryn, and the goat standing in between them, and they're all covered with blood. For me, it's such a perfect snapshot of the absurdity of what we aimed to achieve, and it is very present in its scale and grandeur in that frame for me.

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: I think mine's actually similar in a totally different way. I actually feel like just the two-shot of them at the end, when especially Kathryn has the weird way the blood naturally went on her face. We've talked about this a lot. There's something almost like a dreamlike quality in that last scene where they're just standing there, and they're having a real sister moment. There's something about it that every time I get there, I just go, “Oh, this just feels good.”

GILLETT: “I'm under the spell.” [Laughs]

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: “I want to be here.” There's music. It's just the whole vibe.

There Will Be Blood... Cannons in 'The Mummy'

This duo reveals when filming starts for Brendan Fraser's epic return.

Because now I'm thinking about all the blood, one question that's been high on my mind is, is there a place in The Mummy franchise for blood cannons?

GILLETT: Yes. [Laughs] Without spoiling anything, yes.

I will happily take that.

GILLETT: Blood cannons, sand cannons, you name it. There will be cannons of all sorts.

Do you know when you're going to start filming that?

GILLETT: We're supposed to start prep in May, and hopefully shooting starts in August.

I’m sending all good vibes your way! I'll ask one more question about that, and I'll focus a little more on Scream because that was jumping aboard a fast-moving train with an ongoing series. Is there any lesson you learned making Scream 5 and 6 that you hope is going to come in handy on that, but also anything about Mummy lore in general that you think is going to challenge you in a completely different way?

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: That's a great question. I feel like we have some muscle memory now. You don't want to be too beholden to what came before, but you want to be really respectful of it. It's walking that fine line of giving people and ourselves something new and fresh that stands on its own when it comes out without alienating what came before it, but also without just being nostalgia bait. I think it has to be both of those things.

GILLETT: Scream VI, particularly because it was such a fast-moving train, as you said, was such a project that was built by intuition. The Mummy, we've had more time to develop it, there's going to be a longer prep, and all of that. So, I think one of the challenges for us is going to be, we loved the intuitive experience of it, for as stressful as it is to be kind of chasing the script while you're prepping and really designing it in the moment, really great things also come out of that process because you're making choices from your heart, right? You're not overthinking everything. With so much planning, I think it'll be interesting and fun to find ways to really make intuition a part of that process.

"That's really an inside joke more than anything."

I wanted to make sure to ask this question, too, because when we were talking about Ready or Not Easter eggs in Abigail, you told me that there was a portrait of Henry Czerny’s character in Abigail. So now I need to know, is there an Abigail Easter egg in Ready or Not 2?

GILLETT: I mean, other than Kathryn and Kevin [Durand] are back, and the deaths are very opposite in this one — the other one explodes. [Laughs]

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: I don't think there's anything that we put in there. No, I don't think so.

GILLETT: We've heard a lot about people like, “Oh, it's a shared universe! Shared universe!” That's really an inside joke more than anything.

I think it's even more interesting, though, that Kathryn’s in both things. I would love to see Grace, Faith, and Joey [Melissa Barrera] all come together, and for Joey to be like, “Who the fuck is that?” when she looks at Faith!

GILLETT: Yeah, that's the third sister, Hope.

One really silly question that I wanted to ask, does Mr. Le Bail ever get mad? I feel like when someone breaks one of his rules, there's still the thrill of exploding them. So, does anything actually piss him off?

GILLETT: Well, it was originally scripted, his reaction at the end, remember, was…

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: Like pure rage.

GILLETT: Rage and anger, and we shifted it because we love the idea that he's just…

BETTINELLI-OLPIN: He’s like a puppet master.

GILLETT: He's about chaos. He just loves fucking with people. He is like the Game Master, right? The Dungeon Master. He’s not interested in who wins and who loses, as long as he gets souls, and he will always get souls.

Listen, I want you guys to do whatever you want, but I like those vibes, so more movies about Mr. Le Bail’s world, please. Congratulations! Exceptional, yet again.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is in theaters now.