How Ready or Not escaped The Hunt's fate

A movie where wealthy elites hunt poor people that wasn't canceled amid partisan outrage

Samara Weaving in Ready or Not.
(Image credit: Courteasy Fox Searchlight Pictures)

You may have heard that a satirical movie about wealthy elites hunting commoners for sport — in which their game is derailed by a blond avenging angel, who hunts them instead — was canceled. On the basis of a single trailer — and the phrase "nothing better than going out to the manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables" — Fox News condemned it, Trump tweeted about it, and the movie was withdrawn.

Yet while The Hunt was canceled because it too explicitly adhered to red-blue political divides — pitting billionaire liberal elites straight out of a Josh Hawley fever dream against a cadre of Real Regular Americans — it's interesting to note that Ready or Not, another riff on "The Most Dangerous Game" in which the aristocratic hunters eventually become the prey, premiered without incident this week. Ready or Not lacks on-the-nose political reference points. Grace (played to the gory hilt by Samara Weaving) marries into the Le Domas family — who subsequently hunt her — but the Le Domas family resembles the Obama-voting family of Get Out as much as they do the miscreants on Succession (while all we learn about Grace is that she grew up in foster homes). The family estate where the movie takes place could be anywhere; it was filmed, as it happens, in Ontario.

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Aaron Bady

Aaron Bady is a founding editor at Popula. He was an editor at The New Inquiry and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Pacific Standard, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Oakland, California.