‘Ready or Not 2’ Rolls a Respectable Turn at the Box Office

When Ready or Not hit theaters in 2019, it was largely overlooked by box office pundits amid the Disney-Fox merger and its status as the first release under Searchlight Pictures. Initially treated like a potential dump, the film instead quietly overperformed. It opened to a modest $8 million, then showed strong legs, ultimately earning $28 million domestically and $57 million worldwide on a reported $6 million budget. Huge for an original horror-thriller.

In the film directed by V/H/S and Scream‘s Radio Silence, a bride’s (Samara Weaving) wedding night takes a sinister turn when her eccentric new in-laws force her to play a terrifying game.

The games continued this weekend in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which brought Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) back behind the camera, and Weaving back as Grace, picking up immediately where the first left off.

Searchlight had higher hopes for this follow-up, but box office delays and scheduling shifts left the film in a weird position. Too late for fall and not wanting to delay until summer, the studio was forced to release it this spring and ended up sandwiched between the surprise hit Project Hail Mary, which gobbled up $80M this weekend, and next week’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The latter will all but push Ready or Not 2 out of theaters, while the former will gobble up another $35-40M this coming weekend, also putting Warner Bros./New Line Cinema’s They Will Kill Us All in peril. With studios being reactive, could this be the end of “fun” kitchen sink horror for the time being? Yikes.

All of that said, Ready or Not 2 performed reasonably well at the box office. It opened to $9 million, matching its predecessor, but the challenge is that, as noted above, Project Hail Mary and Super Mario are likely to dominate the market. The film will need a strong run on home video and streaming to offset that competition, given its reported $14M budget. In the end, it should finish with a respectable performance – solid, though not exceptional.