Everything Everywhere All at Once

• 1. Introduction

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  Everything Everywhere All at Once was originally written for a man. The script's first version had a male lead, conceived specifically with Jackie Chan in mind. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert reconceived the protagonist as a woman, deciding that shift would make the husband-wife dynamic feel more compelling. The new lead was initially named Michelle Wang, after the actress they had in mind for the role. That actress asked them to change the name. That conversation was not the last of its kind.

  The film premiered on the 11th of March 2022, at South by Southwest. Its budget fell somewhere between $14 and $25 million. It became A24's highest-grossing film of all time. At the 95th Academy Awards, it won seven of its eleven nominations, and Michelle Yeoh's win made Oscar history.

  How a film centered on a Chinese immigrant's IRS audit ended up among the most decorated pictures of its decade is worth asking. The answer involves a philosophy documentary and a decades-long creative struggle. Kwan and Scheinert fought to cast exactly who the story was written for.

• 2. Twelve Years, One Concept

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  In 1986, a documentary called Sherman's March introduced its audience to the philosophical concept of modal realism. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert encountered that idea in 2010, and it became the seed of their film. Modal realism holds that all possible worlds exist as concretely as our own. The pair, known professionally as the Daniels, spent more than a decade trying to shape that abstraction into a story.

  Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse arrived in 2018 with its own multiversal premise. Kwan called the experience 'a little upsetting.' He remembered thinking: 'Oh shit, everyone's going to beat us to this thing we've been working on.' Rick and Morty proved equally discouraging. Watching its second season felt, in Kwan's words, 'really painful.' He stopped watching the show while writing the screenplay.

  In early drafts, the protagonist was a professor with undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Through research for that character, Kwan discovered he himself had undiagnosed ADHD. By the time production began, the professor had given way to a different character. Evelyn Quan Wang runs a laundromat in Simi Valley, California, and faces a federal tax audit. In August 2018, when the project was publicly announced, the first name attached to the cast was Awkwafina.

• 3. Casting Against the Grain

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  'Evelyn deserves her own story to be told,' Michelle Yeoh told the Daniels about the lead character. She described Evelyn as 'a very ordinary mother and housewife' who is trying her best. For Yeoh, the character's journey was too distinct to be merged with her own identity. 'I don't like to integrate me, Michelle Yeoh, into the characters that I play,' she said. 'They all deserve their own journey and their stories to be told.'

  Awkwafina left the project in January 2020 due to scheduling conflicts, and Stephanie Hsu replaced her. James Hong, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis joined the cast.

  Ke Huy Quan's path to the film began with a meme. It depicted former New York mayoral candidate Andrew Yang as a grown-up Short Round. Short Round was the character Quan had played in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984. The meme prompted the Daniels to look up what Quan had been doing. He had retired from film acting after Second Time Around in 2002, unable to find casting opportunities. He was the right age to play Waymond.

  Quan had only recently returned to the profession when the Daniels contacted him. The success of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 had been part of his motivation. That film traced its own origins to #StarringJohnCho, a movement for Asian representation in leading Hollywood roles. Quan's contract was negotiated by Jeff Cohen, his former co-star from The Goonies in 1985.

  Kwan recalled studios asking whether to try 'a white actor' or find people who 'might actually bring in the money.' The Daniels held firm. Kwan said they 'had to have some really hard conversations' to keep the cast as written. Scheinert said the process took a little longer than expected. Anthony and Joe Russo had signed on as producers alongside Jonathan Wang when the project was first announced in 2018.

• 4. 38 Days in Simi Valley

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  Principal photography began in January 2020, with 38 days of shooting mostly in Simi Valley, California. Filming wrapped in early March, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was reaching the United States. The first cut ran approximately 170 minutes.

  Around this time, Marvel Studios invited the Daniels to help develop the Disney+ series Loki, which dealt with a multiversal storyline. They declined. They were about to start shooting their own film on the same subject.

  Zak Stoltz led a team of eight visual effects artists working entirely in-house. A negative experience with a dedicated post-production studio on their 2016 film Swiss Army Man had pushed the Daniels toward that model. Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro were the primary tools. During the pandemic, the team shared data through a service called Resilio Sync.

  The fanny-pack fight sequence was shot in a day and a half, a pace the Daniels described as unusually quick. Much of the film was captured at high frame rates to enable time remapping in post-production. For the rock universe scene, Runway AI automated the rotoscoping process on green-screen footage, allowing the actors to be combined with background imagery.

  Jamie Lee Curtis grounded her portrayal of IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdre in a specific photographic reference. Kwan had found a photograph of an actual IRS agent online, which Curtis liked and used as a visual model. She used her own body for the film rather than a prosthetic. Scott Rudin had originally been attached as an executive producer but left the project after allegations about his behavior emerged.

• 5. Son Lux and the Score

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  Son Lux, whose three members are Ryan Lott, Ian Chang, and Rafiq Bhatia, spent two to three years composing the film's score. The Daniels asked each member to approach the material individually, not as a band. Lott described the outcome: 'many of these universes of sound could be within reach with this particular trio.'

  The finished score contains more than a hundred musical cues. The soundtrack album runs for more than two hours across 49 tracks. Featured performers include Mitski, David Byrne, a flute-playing Andre 3000, Moses Sumney, Hajnal Pivnick, Randy Newman, and the ensemble yMusic. Two singles appeared before the album's release. 'This Is a Life,' featuring Mitski and Byrne, came out on the 4th of March 2022. 'Fence,' featuring Sumney, followed on March 14. The album arrived on the same day as the film's limited theatrical release in the United States.

  The 2000 Nine Days song 'Absolutely (Story of a Girl)' appears multiple times in the film, in both the audio mix and in dialogue. When the Daniels reached out to Nine Days vocalist John Hampson about using the track, Hampson agreed immediately and recorded three alternate versions of the song specifically for the film. Claude Debussy's Clair de lune serves as the recurring theme for Deirdre, the IRS agent played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Randy Newman, whose career spans scores for nine Disney-Pixar films, also voices a character called Raccacoonie in the film, a reference to the 2007 Pixar production Ratatouille.

• 6. Academy Award Records

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  At the 95th Academy Awards, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis all won acting prizes in the same ceremony. Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress and the first Malaysian to win any Academy Award. She was only the second woman of color to take that prize, after Halle Berry in 2002. Quan became the first Vietnam-born actor to receive an Oscar. Curtis won the first Academy Award of her career. Stephanie Hsu's nomination in Best Supporting Actress, alongside Hong Chau's nomination for The Whale, was historically notable. It marked the first time two actresses of Asian ethnicity competed in that category in the same year.

  For the first time in Oscar history, a science-fiction film won Best Picture. That same night, the film claimed five of the top six Academy Awards. The last film to win seven Oscars in a single ceremony had been Gravity in 2013. The most decorated Best Picture winner before it had been Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. The film became only the fifth to sweep all four major Hollywood guild prizes. Those guilds are the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild. All five films that completed this sweep, including American Beauty, No Country for Old Men, and Argo, also won Best Picture.

  At the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the film claimed four prizes, a record. At the Film Independent Spirit Awards, it won seven of its eight nominations, also a record. It took home two Golden Globe Awards, five Critics' Choice Awards including Best Picture, and one BAFTA Award.

  Justin Chang, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argued the academy had 'chosen the wrong best picture.' He described it as 'as epically self-important, broadly sentimental and thematically unambiguous a movie as any the academy has so honored.' Richard Brody of The New Yorker dismissed it as a 'sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.'

  The film earned $77.2 million in the United States and Canada and $66.2 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $143.4 million. Deadline Hollywood calculated net profit at $32 million. In 2025, The New York Times placed it at number 77 on its list of the hundred best films of the 21st century.