Ready or Not is a horror comedy film franchise from Searchlight Pictures, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of the Radio Silence collective. The original film released August 21, 2019, with Samara Weaving as Grace, a young woman who discovers on her wedding night that her wealthy new in-laws require new family members to play a game chosen at random, with the game drawn being hide and seek, which must be played to the death before sunrise. The sequel, Ready or Not: Here I Come, released March 20, 2026, picking up immediately after the first film and expanding the mythology with four rival families competing for control of a global council.
Ready or Not was directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett from a screenplay by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, releasing August 21, 2019. The film cost approximately six million dollars to produce and earned twenty-eight million dollars domestically, becoming Searchlight’s biggest release of 2019 and establishing itself as a cult horror film through home video and streaming audience growth well beyond its theatrical run. The premise draws on dark satire of inherited wealth and tradition, with the Le Domas family’s devil-worshipping pact requiring them to sacrifice a new family member or face consequences themselves.
Samara Weaving plays Grace with a physical commitment to the role’s escalating desperation that built her profile significantly. Adam Brody plays her husband Alex, Andie MacDowell plays his mother Becky, and Henry Czerny plays family patriarch Tony. The film builds steadily through its single-night timeline, with each attempt Grace makes to escape or call for help failing in ways that push the humor darker without losing the propulsive tension of the central chase.
Ready or Not: Here I Come premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 13, 2026, and released theatrically in the United States on March 20, 2026. The full creative team from the original returned: Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett directing, Busick and Murphy writing, and Weaving starring as Grace. The sequel picks up almost immediately after the first film’s events and widens the world considerably, revealing that the Le Domas family’s game is part of a larger structure involving four rival families competing for the High Seat of a council that controls the world, each now hunting Grace for the throne.
Kathryn Newton joins as Faith, Grace’s estranged sister who becomes her reluctant ally through the sequel’s events. The directors had been developing a separate original project built around a sister storyline for Weaving and Newton before Searchlight approached them about a Ready or Not sequel, and the two projects were merged. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood, Shawn Hatosy, Néstor Carbonell, Kevin Durand, Olivia Cheng, and filmmaker David Cronenberg round out the new cast. The film runs 108 minutes and is rated R. On a budget of approximately fourteen million dollars it grossed thirty-eight million worldwide through April 2026.