EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE(2022)

Title: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Written by: [Not found on cover page]

Draft date: [Not found on cover page]

LOGLINE

A middle-aged Chinese-American laundromat owner, drowning in tax paperwork and a crumbling marriage, discovers during an IRS audit that an alternate-universe version of his wife needs him to verse-jump across infinite realities to stop his own daughter — now an omniscient, nihilistic being — from destroying the multiverse.

Genre: Sci-Fi, Comedy

Sub-genre: Action Comedy, Absurdist Comedy, Family Drama, Multiverse Sci-Fi

Keywords: Multiverse, Asian Theme, Family, Immigrant Experience, Female Antagonist, Ensemble Cast, Martial Arts, Generational Conflict, LGBTQ, Nihilism vs. Hope, Father-Daughter, Marriage, Tax Audit, Surrealism, Redemption

MPA Rating: R (pervasive strong language including multiple uses of "fuck," stylized violence, crude sexual humor, brief disturbing imagery)

Budget Tier: Medium ($10M–$40M) — contemporary urban locations with heavy VFX for multiverse sequences, split-screen work, creature effects (cat transformations, pig universe, spaghetti universe), martial arts choreography, and numerous stylized set pieces across dozens of conceptual environments.

Pages: 133

Time Period: Present over approximately 2 days.

Locations: Approximately 40% IRS office building (multiple floors including cubicles, hallways, stairwells, bathroom, rooftop, break room kitchen, parking lot), 15% Chan family apartment above laundromat, 10% laundromat, and 35% spread across numerous multiverse locations including a fighting arena/stadium, a hot dog finger wedding chapel, a Benihana-style restaurant, a boiling pot of spaghetti, an open field (rock universe), a writer's home office, a sign spinner's pizza shop, an opera house, outer space, a prehistoric mountaintop, a cathedral, and various brief flashes. Period requirements are minimal (brief 1970s Hong Kong flashback). Special requirements include martial arts choreography, tear gas/fire effects, split-screen compositions, and extensive VFX for universe-hopping sequences.

Lead: Male, late 50s-60s, Chinese-American. Overweight, exhausted, wears sweatpants and oversized polo. A well-meaning but scattered laundromat owner who has failed at every ambition he ever pursued, now facing a tax audit, a disintegrating marriage, and an estranged daughter.

Comparables: The Matrix (ordinary person recruited as "the one" to fight a reality-bending threat across dimensions), Kung Fu Hustle (absurdist martial arts comedy with escalating set pieces and an unlikely hero), Swiss Army Man (boundary-pushing absurdist humor married to genuine emotional stakes about human connection), Being John Malkovich (high-concept metaphysical comedy exploring identity and consciousness through surreal premises).

SYNOPSIS

In a university lecture hall, PROFESSOR JACKIE (60s), a physics professor, teaches the double-slit experiment when JOBU TUPAKI (20s), a young Asian woman, appears in his doorway. He dismisses class, contacts someone via Bluetooth earpiece, and draws a handgun. All six rounds misfire. Jobu demonstrates impossible feats — phasing his head through a desk, turning her backpack into a flying pig — before declaring he is "not the one" and departing. Jackie shoots himself. Jobu travels through universes searching for a specific version of Jackie.

In a cramped apartment above a laundromat, JACKIE CHAN (late 50s-60s), a Chinese-American immigrant in sweatpants, struggles to organize years of tax documents with his wife WINONA (late 50s). Jackie is distracted by everything — laundromat customers, his catatonic father YIEH YIEH (80s+), a homeless man's soiled pants. Winona tries to connect with Jackie over late-night tea, but he pushes her away. Alone at 3 AM, Jackie calls TurboTax in despair. Meanwhile, Winona prepares divorce papers.

The next morning, Jackie and Winona drive to their IRS audit. In the elevator, Winona suddenly transforms — she speaks English, covers the security camera, scans Jackie's head with futuristic devices, and gives him coded instructions on the back of the divorce papers before going limp. Normal Winona returns, disoriented. During the audit with DESMOND (40s), an aggressive IRS auditor, Jackie follows the instructions: he switches his shoes, imagines a janitor's closet, and presses a green button on the Bluetooth devices. His consciousness splits between the cubicle and the closet, where ALPHA WINONA — an alternate-universe version of his wife — explains that she is from the "Alphaverse," that Jackie's counterpart there discovered verse-jumping technology, and that a being called Jobu Tupaki is hunting Jackies across universes.

Desmond, now possessed by a Jobu follower, attacks with superhuman strength. Alpha Winona, verse-jumping into a gymnast's skills through paper cuts, fights back but is separated from Jackie. Jackie is forced to verse-jump on his own by professing love to Desmond as an "unlikely action" launching pad. He connects with JACKIE.FIGHTER, a martial arts superstar who never followed Winona to America, and downloads decades of combat training. He defeats Desmond but is emotionally shattered by experiencing a life without Winona. Alpha Winona returns and warns him his mind is cracking — other universes are leaking through.

JOY (20s-30s), Jackie's daughter, appears as herself, confused and on the phone with BECKY, her wife. Jackie and Winona learn Joy married without telling them. Jackie calls Joy "a monster," devastating her. Alpha Winona drags Jackie away and explains Joy's origin: in the Alphaverse, Alpha Jackie pushed Joy too hard at verse-jumping, shattering her consciousness across every universe simultaneously, creating Jobu Tupaki — a nihilistic being who sees everything and believes nothing matters. Alpha Winona gives Jackie a jury-rigged helmet designed to kill Joy across all universes and tells him he is uniquely qualified because his many failures correspond to many alternate-life skills.

Jackie fights Jobu on the IRS rooftop. She torments him with revelations — his fighting career is rigged, a version of him is writing everything that happens — until she reads his future actions from a manuscript. Jackie places the helmet on Jobu and activates it. She dies. Jackie collapses. The apparent ending gives way to multiple alternate endings during the credits: Jobu survives, Winona is actually Jobu in disguise, Alpha Winona returns, Alpha Jackie appears. The endings multiply until Jackie's consciousness fractures completely, exploding across infinite universes simultaneously.

In Part 2, Jackie drifts through universes unable to anchor himself. In the Hot Dog Universe (where everyone has hot dog fingers), he attends Joy's wedding to Becky. Joy, also everywhere, tells him there is no purpose — just go numb. In the Tax Universe, Winona places divorce papers beside him. In the Fighter Universe, Jackie watches Winona walk away. Across every universe, Jackie spirals into destructive nihilism — defiling a watermelon at Joy's wedding, exposing Raccacoonie (a cooking raccoon puppeting a chef named BEEFY), destroying relationships with CHRIS (his husband/editor in the Writer Universe). In the Rock Universe, where Jackie and Joy exist as sentient rocks by a brook, Joy reveals a universe where she married a Chinese doctor and Jackie was proud of her — the life she tried to avoid.

Jackie watches Winona's quiet dignity across universes — sweeping up his mess, confronting an armed Desmond with nothing but kindness. In the Writer Universe, Jackie.Writer races to a bar with his manuscript to reconcile with Chris. Back in the Hero Universe, Jackie recognizes a SWAT officer as Chris and uses knowledge from another life to break through his emotional armor. Jackie shifts strategy entirely: instead of fighting, he transforms weapons into comfort objects — a riot shield becomes a child's blankie, taser wires become earbuds playing a lullaby, grenades become perfume. In the Tax Universe, Jackie signs the divorce papers, then asks Winona what she wants now that they are free. She tears them up.

In the Hot Dog Universe, Joy accepts Jackie's offer to dance. In the Spaghetti Universe, Jackie rescues his noodle son. In the Fighter Universe, Jackie and McGregor agree to fight for real. Across all universes, Jackie's actions converge in a crescendo scored by typewriter keystrokes from the Writer Universe. Joy's head rests on Jackie's shoulder.

Part 3: The next morning, Jackie and Winona walk into the IRS building holding hands. Jackie admits he will always fear she might want divorce again. Winona says she does not want one today. They kiss. They sit before Desmond for their rescheduled audit, holding hands with serene patience as he lists their infractions.

COMMENTS

PREMISE — Excellent

The core concept — a failing immigrant father discovers he can access alternate versions of himself across infinite universes, only to learn his estranged daughter has become an omniscient nihilist he must either kill or save — is a richly layered premise that embeds family drama, immigrant experience, and existential philosophy inside a multiverse action-comedy framework. The dramatic question is compelling on two levels: externally, whether Jackie can stop Jobu Tupaki, and internally, whether a man who considers himself a failure at everything can find meaning in a life defined by what-ifs. The IRS audit setting grounds the cosmic stakes in mundane specificity — Jackie's greatest threat is not interdimensional warfare but a pile of receipts and a marriage falling apart. The premise generates natural tension between Jackie's desire to be a hero and his inability to manage the simplest responsibilities, making him uniquely suited to the threat precisely because of his inadequacy. The thematic architecture is ambitious: nihilism versus meaning, the paralysis of infinite choice, the immigrant parent's impossible expectations versus the child's need for acceptance. Where The Matrix asks "what is real," this material asks "what matters when everything is real," which is a meaningfully different and more emotionally resonant question.

STRUCTURE — Fair

The three-part structure (Everything / Everywhere / All at Once) maps onto a clear emotional trajectory — engagement, despair, reconciliation — but the proportions and transitions are uneven. The inciting incident lands effectively around page 15 when Alpha Winona hijacks the elevator, roughly 11% of the way through. The commitment to the central conflict (Jackie's first verse-jump) occurs around page 38 (29%), which runs slightly late. The midpoint — Jackie using the helmet to apparently kill Joy on the rooftop (89-90) — falls at approximately 67%, which is structurally closer to a Break into Three than a true midpoint, and the material preceding it already feels like it has been escalating toward climax. The false ending and credit-sequence alternate endings (90-98) are a bold structural gambit that works conceptually — demonstrating the multiverse's refusal to resolve neatly — but the transition into Part 2 after a title card reading "THE END" risks losing momentum in execution. Part 2's extended nihilism spiral (98-117) functions as the actual dark night of the soul, but at nearly 20 pages of Jackie behaving destructively across universes, it tests patience before the emotional turn arrives. Part 3 (132-133) is admirably restrained at two pages, but the resolution of Jackie and Winona's marriage happens so quickly after the emotional crescendo that it borders on abbreviation. The Tax Universe subplot — Jackie literally finishing his taxes — provides a grounding throughline that pays off beautifully (131), but the structural mechanism of using scrolling credits as narrative space is a high-risk choice that may read better on the page than it functions as blueprint.

CHARACTER — Good

Jackie is a fully realized protagonist whose arc satisfies all five essential beats: a clear backstory of accumulated failure and immigrant sacrifice, a want (to be seen as a hero), an internal need (to accept his life and connect with his family), active pursuit of his goal through verse-jumping, and genuine transformation when he shifts from fighting to kindness. His characterization as "the worst Jackie" — whose failures make him capable of anything — is the material's single most inventive character concept, articulated explicitly by Alpha Winona (64-65). Winona is the emotional anchor, and her quiet moral authority in the Hero Universe — stepping between Desmond's gun and Jackie with nothing but empathy (116) — earns the resolution more than any action sequence. Joy/Jobu Tupaki functions effectively as both antagonist and emotional stakes, though her motivation (nihilistic despair from seeing everything) is more clearly explained than dramatized in her own scenes. The Rock Universe conversation (112-114) is the material's emotional peak, where Joy reveals the universe where she married a doctor and Jackie was proud — the life she tried to escape — which crystallizes the parent-child wound with devastating economy. Supporting characters like Desmond serve primarily as functional obstacles, though the running gag of his repeated leg wounds (53, 76) gives him comedic identity. Alpha Winona is well-differentiated from regular Winona through her English-language confidence and tactical precision, making the body-sharing conceit legible.

CONFLICT — Good

The central external conflict — Jackie versus Jobu Tupaki across infinite universes — escalates effectively from a single possessed auditor (34) to a cult of verse-jumping followers (68) to a direct father-daughter confrontation on the rooftop (80-89). The internal conflict is more potent: Jackie's desperate need to matter versus the multiverse's demonstration that nothing matters more than anything else. This philosophical conflict drives the material's most important decisions, particularly Jackie's choice to sign the divorce papers (127) as a way of stripping away obligation to find genuine desire. Scene-level conflict is consistently present — the audit itself generates tension through Desmond's discovery of deductions like karaoke machines (19), and the elevator sequence (14-16) layers marital tension beneath espionage urgency. The resolution of the external conflict through kindness rather than violence (123-125) is earned by the preceding despair of Part 2, where Jackie's attempts at force consistently make things worse. The one area where conflict sags is the extended multiverse tourism of Part 2's nihilism montage (105-111), where the emotional stakes flatten because Jackie is causing harm without meaningful resistance.

DIALOGUE — Good

Dialogue is sharply differentiated across characters and registers, with Jackie's broken English generating both comedy and pathos. His mangling of "Ratatouille" into "Raccacoonie" (66-67) is a small masterclass in character-specific humor that also seeds a major subplot. Alpha Winona's crisp English contrasts effectively with regular Winona's Cantonese-inflected speech, making the body-swapping legible through voice alone — "I told you to stay low and out of sight" (27) signals the switch before any exposition. Jobu's dialogue oscillates between deadpan philosophical provocation ("Your concept of infinity is still way too fucking small," 4) and wounded-daughter vulnerability ("No. No you didn't," 53), which effectively conveys her fractured identity. The material's strongest dialogue moment is Winona's speech to Desmond: "I don't know what's going on, but I do know that we all have to try to be good people, especially when no one knows what the fuck is happening" (116) — it distills the thematic argument into a single line delivered by the character with the least information and the most moral clarity. Desmond's repeated "THE SAME HOLE?!" (53, 76) functions as effective comic relief that also humanizes a character used primarily as a weapon. The weakest dialogue belongs to the Alphaverse officers, whose functional exposition ("Calculating route," "Paper cuts, four of them between each finger," 36) serves mechanical purposes without distinctive voice.

PACING — Fair

The opening sequence through the first verse-jump (2-44) moves at an effective clip, with the audit providing a ticking clock and Alpha Winona's exposition delivered during active pursuit rather than static conversation. The fight choreography sequences — particularly the sign-spinner shield combat (74) and the pinky-powered kitchen fight (76) — maintain propulsive energy by cross-cutting between skill acquisition and application. Pacing falters most significantly in Part 2's nihilism spiral (98-111), which runs approximately thirteen pages of Jackie behaving destructively across universes without meaningful narrative progression. The montage structure means individual beats are short, but their cumulative effect is repetitive — each universe shows Jackie causing harm, and the emotional register remains static until the Rock Universe conversation breaks through (112). The material's most effective pacing choice is Part 3's brevity: two pages (132-133) that resolve the marriage with quiet confidence after 130 pages of cosmic chaos. The credit-sequence alternate endings (90-98) present a unique pacing challenge — they function as narrative content disguised as paratext, which is intellectually stimulating but creates an artificial pause in forward momentum.

TONE — Good

The tonal range is extraordinarily wide — from slapstick (Jackie's hot dog fingers entering a watermelon hole, 56) to genuine grief (Alpha Winona's death, 66-67) to existential philosophy (the Rock Universe, 112-114) — and the material manages these shifts more successfully than not. The key tonal anchor is Jackie himself, whose earnest confusion grounds even the most absurd sequences. The Raccacoonie subplot and the spaghetti universe could easily tip into randomness-for-its-own-sake, but both pay off emotionally: Raccacoonie's Randy Newman ballad scores the despair montage (110-111), and the noodle father rescuing his macaroni son parallels Jackie rescuing Joy (129). Where tone wobbles is in the wedding speech sequence (106-108), where Jackie's cruelty across universes — drawing a Hitler mustache on a baby, publicly humiliating Joy — pushes past dark comedy into territory that makes his subsequent redemption harder to credit. The Tapir pig universe's prehensile penis joke (96-97) similarly strains against the material's emotional seriousness, though it functions within Jobu's thesis that everything is absurd. The Rock Universe conversation achieves the most precise tonal calibration: two rocks having the most honest father-daughter conversation in the material, which is simultaneously ridiculous and devastating.

ORIGINALITY — Excellent

The multiverse concept has obvious predecessors in The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, and Run Lola Run, but the execution distinguishes itself through two specific innovations. First, the verse-jumping mechanic requires improbable actions as fuel — eating lipstick, giving yourself paper cuts, professing love to your attacker — which transforms the action sequences from standard fight choreography into absurdist problem-solving that has no direct cinematic antecedent. Second, the decision to make the protagonist "the one" specifically because he is the worst version of himself inverts the Chosen One trope in a way that is structurally generative rather than merely ironic. The hot dog finger universe, the sentient rocks, and the spaghetti family exist in territory closer to Swiss Army Man or Charlie Kaufman's work than to standard multiverse fiction, and they earn their absurdity by carrying genuine emotional weight. The false ending and credit-sequence narrative is formally ambitious in a way that recalls Adaptation or Brecht's theatrical alienation, though the execution risks confusion on the page. The material's most original contribution is its argument that nihilism and empathy are both rational responses to infinity, and that choosing empathy is an act of will rather than logic — a philosophical position that the genre landscape has not explored with this specificity.

LOGIC — Poor

The verse-jumping rules are established clearly enough — improbable actions create momentum, Bluetooth devices enable connection, skills transfer across universes — but their application is inconsistent. Alpha Winona states Jackie cannot jump without guided trajectory (56), yet he repeatedly jumps unguided with varying consequences that seem determined by narrative need rather than established rules. The "jumping pad" mechanic (38-39) is well-explained through the Point A/B/C diagram, but later jumps abandon this framework without explanation. The hot dog universe jump is described as one that "would fry most people" (57), yet Jackie subsequently jumps to even more distant universes (spaghetti, rocks, Tapir pigs) without additional consequence. Jobu's powers are deliberately undefined — she can transform objects, read manuscripts from other universes, possess anyone — which serves the thematic point that she has transcended rules, but it also means there is no coherent threat model for the climax. The helmet that kills Joy "in every universe" (64) raises an obvious question: if there are infinite universes, how can any device affect all of them? This is partially addressed by the alternate endings showing her surviving, but the Part 3 resolution implies she is simply Joy again without explaining how. The divorce-papers-as-instructions misunderstanding (24-25) works as comedy but requires Winona to not notice her own handwriting on the back of legal documents she prepared.

CRAFT — Good

The writing voice is distinctively energetic, with a maximalist approach to action description that matches the material's anything-goes aesthetic. Character introductions are effective — Jackie.Taxes is introduced through his environment ("years of tax documents and old receipts threaten to drown him in his overpopulated apartment," 7) rather than physical description, which immediately communicates his inner state. The split-screen notation is handled cleanly, with clear headers distinguishing universes and consistent formatting for cross-cutting (17-18, 40-41). Stage directions carry personality: "chk-chk-meow" for the cat gun (58) and "She kneels down beside Desmond and pats him on the head" (53) convey Jobu's casual menace economically. The material's craft weakness is its reliance on parenthetical voice-over exposition for the Alphaverse mechanics (32-33, 63-64), which becomes increasingly dense as the rules grow more complex. Several typos appear throughout: "it's" for "its" (5, "rubs it's back"), "see's" for "sees" (6), "loosing" likely intended as "losing" (117). The Randy Newman/Raccacoonie song lyrics embedded in the montage (110-111) represent an unusual formatting choice that works on the page but would require significant collaboration to execute. The three-part title card structure (7, 98, 132) provides clear navigational architecture for a disorienting narrative.

OVERALL — Recommend

Everything Everywhere All at Once is an absurdist multiverse action-comedy about a Chinese-American laundromat owner who discovers he can access alternate versions of himself across infinite realities and must use this power to save his nihilistic, omniscient daughter — and his marriage. The material's greatest strengths are its Premise and Character: the conceptual architecture of a man whose failures make him uniquely powerful is both thematically rich and narratively generative, and the emotional core — a father learning to accept his daughter and reconnect with his wife — grounds even the most surreal sequences in recognizable human pain. The Originality is genuine, with the improbable-action verse-jumping mechanic and the hot-dog/rock/spaghetti universes offering set pieces that have no direct precedent. The most significant weakness is Pacing in Part 2, where the extended nihilism montage flattens emotional stakes through repetition before the Rock Universe conversation restores them. Logic presents a secondary concern: the verse-jumping rules bend to serve narrative convenience rather than maintaining internal consistency. The Tone is remarkably well-managed given the range attempted, though several moments of cruelty in Jackie's nihilistic spiral threaten to undermine his subsequent redemption. The Craft voice is confident and distinctive, with action description that conveys both visual spectacle and emotional register, though exposition-heavy voice-over passages slow momentum in the middle sections. This is ambitious, emotionally committed material whose reach occasionally exceeds its structural grasp but whose central argument — that choosing kindness in an indifferent universe is the only meaningful act — lands with genuine force.