How Everything Everywhere All At Once Became a Juggernaut

Culture
The indie hit crossed the $50 million box office mark, and shows few signs of slowing down.

Image may contain Face Human Person Michelle Yeoh Photo Photography Portrait and Smile

Photograph: Everett Collection; Collage by Gabe Conte

On March 25th, Everything Everywhere All at Once opened on 10 screens in a few major North American markets where it performed spectacularly well, grossing over a half-million dollars and earning a per-screen average of over $50,000. (As a point of comparison, that same week’s box office champ, The Lost City, earned a little over $7000 per screen.) This was not particularly surprising. A wildly inventive family drama in the form of a multiverse-spanning action film filled with bizarre ideas and thrillingly staged martial arts action sequences, Everything Everywhere All at Once had all the makings of an arthouse hit even before it arrived in theaters, earning strong reviews and benefitting from an intriguing marketing campaign from distributor A24, no stranger to making arthouse hits. Nor was it surprising that the film would continue to find more success as its run expanded.

What is surprising is just how much success it would find. The film will almost certainly cross the $50 million mark this weekend in a run that has yet to experience a dramatic drop-off or even a definitive tapering off. In fact, Everything Everywhere All at Once added theaters last week as it dropped a mere 6%. In short, it’s performed extraordinarily well—and it’s not done.

Just how well? Scott Mendelson, who covers film and box office results for Forbes, puts it in perspective by noting that “when it hits the $52 million mark it will outgross House of Gucci at the domestic box office. That means it will have made more than any of last year’s Oscar-season awards releases, except for Dune.” That means it’s blown past films directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg, big (if admittedly underperforming) studio releases with big studio marketing campaigns that arrived in theaters in the midst of the movie-friendly holiday season.

So what accounts for the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once? It’s tough to pin down and, despite the advantages of good reviews and a canny distributor, the film’s performance defies conventional wisdom. It’s not part of a franchise. Star Michelle Yeoh first found fame in the Hong Kong film industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s. She’s known and loved by many in the West thanks to films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Crazy Rich Asians, but her name isn’t a box office draw. Co-star Ke Huy Quan did appear in some huge hits, but as a child star back in the ’80s when he could be found in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies. Set across the personal parallel universes of Evelyn (Yeoh), a laundromat owner in a strained marriage who has trouble connecting with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), the plot resists easy description. The tone veers from darkly comedic to unabashedly sentimental (touching all points in between). The previous feature co-directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a team collectively known as “Daniels,” Swiss Army Man, was warmly received but didn’t make them household names. And though Everything Everywhere All at Once is wildly entertaining it’s also demanding, maintaining a frenetic pace for much of its 139 minute running time. “It’s certainly not,” Mendelson says, “a film that’s intended to be watched while you are doing chores or playing on your phone.”

It’s also an extremely personal film, in spite of scenes with sentient rocks and wild martial arts sequences. Kwan has described the film as both an attempt to understand and forgive his parents and as a key to recognizing his previously undiagnosed ADHD. The gulf in understanding between first- and second-generation Asian-Americans is central to its narrative. The flitting from place to place, tone to tone, and dimension to dimension is a reflection of ADHD. “I’m hoping that this film could be part of that kind of awareness, the movement of awareness around that particular mental illness or handicap,” Kwan recently told The Verge.

No small amount of the credit belongs to A24’s ability to lure in curious and adventurous audiences looking for something different and new. Everything Everywhere All at Once’s marketing campaign has made its restless style a selling point. It’s evident in the film’s title, its overstuffed poster, and a trailer that lets Yeoh’s voiceover explain the premise while offering glimpses of a wild and unusual ride. A24 first enjoyed success by turning small-scale arthouse releases like Spring Breakers and Under the Skin into must-sees. Now, almost ten years into its existence, the company’s catalog has made A24 a trusted brand able to generate interest just by its name alone. “I don’t think there’s any other studio that could have gotten a 1970s slasher film that takes place on a porno set to $11 million domestic,” Mendelson says, referring to the recently released Ti West film X.

Though what exactly that brand name means is a little slippery. Some of A24’s most successful releases have been in the horror genre, like Hereditary, Midsommar, and The Witch, but it’s also responsible for Lady Bird, Moonlight, Uncut Gems, and other director-driven projects that don’t easily fit into any genre. “A24 has managed to have its brand represent an intersection of art film aesthetics and accessible subject matter,” New York magazine film critic Alison Willmore says. “It represents a certain type of adventurousness: edgy in terms of content, daring in terms of storytelling, but still narratively propulsive. That’s key to its aura of youthful cool — that the challenges its films offer are not ones about how difficult they are to watch.”

Of course, no amount of brand loyalty or canny salesmanship would have taken Everything Everywhere All at Once this far if the film didn’t deliver. It helps that so many who’ve seen the film like it, and like it enough to tell others about it, who then tell others about it, who tell others and so on. Exit surveys conducted by PostTrak early in the run revealed that 46% of the film’s audience turned out because they heard it was good. While blockbusters live or die on their opening weekend returns, word of mouth can help sustain an arthouse hit. But it rarely sustains one this much.

Films usually don’t linger in theaters playing to sizable crowds week in and week out anymore. In some respects we’re still figuring out how theaters work after the forced closures of COVID-19, a period that saw major releases delayed and studios experimenting with premiering some big titles in theaters and on streaming services simultaneously. Pre-COVID trends seemed to suggest a future in which only the biggest movies played multiplexes, more niche movies played arthouses, and everything else fell into a gulf between the two—which usually meant they either appeared on streaming services or found most of their audience there after a short theatrical run.

Could Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s success suggest a post-quarantine sea change? Perhaps not. It could be an instance of the right film arriving at the right time, one based in a very specific experience but with universal resonance. The same PostTrak surveys found 21% of the audience to be Asian-American (a 2018 poll found that Asian-Americans account for 7% of all movie ticket buyers). That undoubtedly provided a boost, but Willmore cautions against drawing conclusions about finding an underserved audience.

“The Asian diaspora in the U.S. is vast and varied,” she says. “God knows, even as the California-raised daughter of a Chinese immigrant, I found a lot of resonance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and also plenty of details about the Wang family’s lives that weren’t at all like mine.” “Part of the appeal of the film,” she continues, “is that it is about Asian American characters without being marketed as an Asian American film — its characters simply are, and just as relatable in all their cultural and personal specifics as anyone else.”

The more granular and accurate the details, the more real and relatable a film can seem, even to viewers without a shared cultural experience. As little as the two films otherwise have in common, Everything Everywhere All At Once is akin in that sense to another indie breakout of years past, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which didn’t hold back on the details of Greek-American life but featured characters, themes, and situations recognizable to viewers of any background. By getting into the specifics of Evelyn’s life, like her wariness at playing host to her visiting father (James Hong), because she suspects he’ll be uncomfortable with Joy’s relation with another woman, or the cramped apartment filled with Chinese decorations she lives in above her place of business,Everything Everywhere All at Once taps into universal experiences of loneliness and parental estrangement.”

Whatever the reasons the film has connected to an unexpectedly wide audience, that connection is impossible to deny. And even if Everything Everywhere All at Once’s success might prove difficult for others to replicate, it also proves this kind of breakthrough can still be achieved, and that a comparatively little film can play alongside big budget fare like The Lost City, Morbius, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, The Bad Guys, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. All those films topped the box office chart during Everything’s run. Most are in the process of vanishing from theaters (and many, seemingly, from memory) if they haven’t vanished already. Meanwhile, a movie about a laundromat owner’s transdimensional adventures in familial reconciliation plays on and on, challenging preconceptions about what moviegoers want and inviting other filmmakers to do the same.

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