After surviving an all-out attack, the bride discovers she’s reached the next level of the nightmarish game, and this time with her estranged sister. They must stay alive as four rival families hunt them down. A film by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, starring Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Nestor Carbonell, David Cronenberg, Kevin Durand, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, Daniel Beirne, Antony Hall, Nadeem Umar-Khitab, Maša Lizdek, Maia Jae, Juan Pablo Romero, Kara Wooten, and Elijah Wood.

Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett with a screenplay by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, READY or NOT : HERE I COME is a direct sequel following the surviving bride and her estranged sister as they are hunted by Satan-worshipping families in a deadly ritual to claim a high seat in a council that controls the world.

Building on the supernatural twist from the first film’s finale, the sequel delivers an entertaining expansion of the lore. We learn there are actually six families in total, all tied to a strict set of unbreakable rules. And breaking them is punishable by death.

Casting Elijah Wood as the lawyer is an amusing touch, given that he once played Frodo in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, a character destined to destroy the One Ring that could rule them all. Here, he plays a representative of Le Bail who oversees the deadly ritual, where competing families play for a gold ring symbolizing the high seat of a council with the power to control the world.

The sequel introduces a larger, more international ensemble with rival families from China, Spain, the US, and England. However, the new players come across as bumbling amateurs fumbling through a deadly game, some with absurd arrogance that eventually leads to their demise.

For a movie trying to be a horror-comedy, it just never pushes the humor or the darkness far enough. The funny thing is, the original movie genuinely kept you on the edge of your seat, believing the protagonist’s life was actually on the line. The sequel fails to replicate those thrills, largely because the script introduces loopholes into its own mythology. Instead of escalating the danger, these workarounds make the conclusion feel underwhelming. It earns 2.5 stars for the plot, and a bonus 0.5 stars for casting Frodo Baggins.

READY OR NOT: HERE I COME premiered at SXSW on 14 March 2026. The film was theatrically released in the United States on 20 March.