Everything Everywhere All At Once editor Paul Rogers breaks down why the movie was cut down by half an hour. The multiversal movie took the world by storm earlier this year as a completely original science fiction adventure with a family story at its core. The movie follows Evelyn Quan Wang as she is pulled into a multiverse-hopping mission to stop Jobu Tupaki. As she is pulled deeper into this conflict, Evelyn must face hard truths in order to save the entire multiverse and her family. Everything Everywhere All At Once earned critical acclaim and grossed over $103 million worldwide.
In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, Rogers explains why they needed to cut half an hour from Everything Everywhere All At Once. Rogers shares how the original ending wrapped up almost every character's story, making the final trek up the stairs ridiculously long. He also reveals an entire universe that was scrapped from the movie.
Paul Rogers: The first cut was two hours and forty-five minutes, I think, so we cut around half an hour of movie out of it. Some of the characters who pop up early in the film or the fight scenes popped up again at the end, and they had their stories very cleanly and nicely wrapped up. We realized that our ending was forty-five minutes long, just her trying to get up the stairs at the end to keep Joy from getting into the bagel. I'm probably exaggerating, but it was very long. And [we realized] that people didn't really need to see all the stories wrapped up. They didn't need to see Jenny Slate's character on a Zoom call with her baby at a birthday party.
It was all this stuff that was really cool and funny and great in the moment, but when you put it all together, the cup was overflowing. [There were] some deleted scenes. There was a universe called Spaghetti Baby Noodle Boy; that whole universe we just excised from the film.
How Many Other Everything Everywhere All At Once Universes Might There Be?
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a human story at its core. It makes sense that the creators would want to complete the arc of each of the characters that are introduced, especially as the multiverse versions are brought in as well. However, by cutting down on time spent on these side characters, Everything Everywhere All At Once keeps the focus on the Wang family as the heart of the movie. The struggle between Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy needs to take center stage, and by staying focused on their climactic moment on the stairs, the movie emphasizes this point.
Everything Everywhere All At Once introduces a ton of universes, some more bizarre and absurd than others. The universe where Joy and Evelyn are rocks is a truly wild concept, as is the hot dog fingers universe. While others are more grounded while still nodding to the endless possibilities of the multiverse, the movie uses real footage of Michelle Yeoh as a famous version of Evelyn. A universe called Spaghetti Boy or Noodle Boy seems like it could be in a similar vein as hot dog fingers.
The beauty of the multiverse is that it truly has an unfathomable number of possible universes. Each moment, each decision, and every step in evolution could theoretically create a different universe. Alternate universes could be spawned from each and every moment, with some having clear points of creation, like Evelyn and Waymond not getting married, while others are so odd that the question of how they came to be remains a mystery. The movie explores an impressive number of alternate universes as Evelyn travels through the multiverse and reveals that Jobu Tupaki destroyed even more before Everything Everywhere All At Once even began.