A deleted scene lays out a very different path for Everything Everywhere All At Once
In Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s wild, universe-hopping movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, a lot of the plot revolves around the branch points where people make their significant choices. Every decision creates a new timeline, and a new what-if world. The hefty companion artbook A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur creates its own set of what-ifs — particularly in the script for a scene the Daniels cut from the film. The sequence suggests an entire alternate timeline for their movie, with entirely new characters and a radically different tone.
In this early version of the movie, Kwan tells Polygon, the Wang family — Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), and her father, husband, and daughter — were briefly introduced at the beginning, before an unseen narrator took over the story. “It used to tie in more with the family,” Kwan says. “It started with a video of the family, and then the narrator would be like, ‘Anyways, let’s continue!’ and we leap into this other thing.”
“This whole other thing” is a sequence that feels like something out of Douglas Adams’ classic tongue-in-cheek sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — particularly the radio-play version and the 1981 BBC TV version, which frame the story with narration from the titular hitchhiker’s guide.
The narrator in Everything Everywhere’s deleted scene starts out by introducing the story in cosmic terms: “Here we are, in this moment, at the beginning. And because most beginnings are also often endings, it would be wrong for me not to point out that we are also here, at the end. And because every moment would not be possible without the moment before it and is rendered unnecessary without the moment after
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