Production Budget Analysis

What was the production budget for Everything Everywhere All at Once?

Directed by Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan, with Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan leading the cast, Everything Everywhere All at Once was produced by IAC Films with a confirmed budget of $25,000,000, placing it in the low-budget category for action films.

At $25,000,000, Everything Everywhere All at Once was produced on a modest budget. Lower-budget films benefit from reduced break-even thresholds, with profitability achievable at approximately $62,500,000.

Budget Comparison — Similar Productions

• 1408 (2007): Budget $25,000,000 | Gross $133,000,000 → ROI: 432% • A Journal for Jordan (2021): Budget $25,000,000 | Gross $6,700,000 → ROI: -73% • Abandon (2002): Budget $25,000,000 | Gross $10,719,357 → ROI: -57% • All My Life (2020): Budget $25,000,000 | Gross $2,000,000 → ROI: -92% • August Rush (2007): Budget $25,000,000 | Gross $66,122,026 → ROI: 164%

Key Budget Allocation Categories

▸ Stunts, Action Sequences & Visual Effects Action films allocate a substantial portion of their budget to choreographing and executing practical stunts, pyrotechnics, and CGI-heavy sequences. For large-scale productions, VFX alone can account for 20–30% of the total budget, with additional costs for stunt coordinators, rigging, and safety crews.

▸ Above-the-Line Talent (Cast & Director) A-list talent commands significant upfront fees plus backend participation. Lead actors in major action franchises typically earn $10–25 million per film, with directors often receiving comparable compensation packages tied to box office performance.

▸ Production Design, Sets & Locations Action films frequently require multiple international shooting locations, large-scale set construction, vehicle acquisitions and modifications, and specialized equipment — all of which drive production costs well above those of dialogue-driven genres.

Key Production Personnel

CAST: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis Key roles: Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang; Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki; Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang; James Hong as Gong Gong

DIRECTOR: Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan CINEMATOGRAPHY: Larkin Seiple MUSIC: Ryan Lott, Ian Chang EDITING: Paul Rogers PRODUCTION: IAC Films, AGBO, Ley Line Entertainment, Year of the Rat, A24 FILMED IN: United States of America

Box Office Performance

Everything Everywhere All at Once earned $69,908,189 domestically and $69,291,811 internationally, for a worldwide total of $139,200,000. Revenue was split 50% domestic / 50% international.

Break-Even Analysis

Using the industry-standard 2.5x multiplier (P&A + exhibitor shares of 40–50% + distribution fees), Everything Everywhere All at Once needed approximately $62,500,000 to break even. The film surpassed this threshold by $76,700,000.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Revenue: $139,200,000 Budget: $25,000,000 Net: $114,200,000 ROI: 456.8%

Profitability Assessment

VERDICT: Highly Profitable

Everything Everywhere All at Once was a clear financial success, generating $139,200,000 worldwide against a $25,000,000 production budget — a 457% ROI. After estimated marketing costs, the film still delivered substantial profit to IAC Films.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

The outsized success of Everything Everywhere All at Once likely influenced studio greenlight decisions for similar action projects.

On January 1, 2024, Rolling Stone ranked the film at number 49 on its list of "The 150 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time," writing "As characters leap from universe to universe (including one where humanity evolved to have... hot dog fingers?), and borrow skills from their counterparts, the Daniels never lose sight of the frayed emotions that are still tying the three main characters together, which in turn kept the metaphysical machinations feeling clear and easy to follow."

IndieWire ranked it at number 8 on its list of the "50 Best Action Movies of the 21st Century" and number 5 on its list of the "62 Best Science Fiction Films of the 21st Century." In 2025, it ranked number 77 on The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Casting

The script was written for Jackie Chan until Kwan and Scheinert reconceived the protagonist as a woman, feeling it would make the husband–wife dynamic in the story more relatable.

The new script's lead character was initially named Michelle Wang, after the film's lead actress Michelle Yeoh, who said, "If you ask the Daniels, when they started on this draft, they focused on, 'Well, we are doing this for Michelle Yeoh.'" The character's name was eventually changed to Evelyn. With her resemblance to the version of Evelyn as a martial artist and film star, Yeoh opposed naming the character Michelle. "Evelyn deserves her own story to be told. This is a very ordinary mother [and] housewife who is trying her best to be a good mother to her daughter, a good daughter to her father, a wife that's trying to keep the family together [...] I don't like to integrate me, Michelle Yeoh, into the characters that I play, because they all deserve their own journey and their stories to be told". Awkwafina left the project in January 2020 due to scheduling conflicts, and was replaced with Stephanie Hsu. James Hong, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis joined the cast. It marked Quan's return to film acting, from which he had retired after Second Time Around (2002) due to a lack of casting opportunities. Kwan and Scheinert were inspired to cast Quan after seeing a meme of former New York mayoral candidate Andrew Yang being shown as a grown-up version of Short Round, Quan's character from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). They were curious to learn what Quan had been doing, and learned that he was the right age to portray Waymond. Coincidentally, Quan had returned to acting, inspired by the success of Crazy Rich Asians (2018), soon before he was approached for the role. This is a result of a domino effect where the director Jon M. Chu was inspired to create Crazy Rich Asians because of #StarringJohnCho, a movement about Asian representation in leading roles in Hollywood.

▸ Filming & Locations

Principal photography began in January 2020, with A24 announcing that it would finance and distribute the film, while Scott Rudin was originally going to be an executive producer on the film, but left because of allegations involving his behavior. Shooting took 38 days, mostly in Simi Valley, California. Much of the film was shot overcranked at a very high frame rate to accommodate extensive time remapping in post production. The Daniels said the kung-fu fight scenes were shot unusually quickly; for example, the fanny-pack fight was shot in a day and a half. Filming wrapped in early March 2020, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The first cut ran around 170 minutes.

[Filming] Principal photography began in January 2020, with A24 announcing that it would finance and distribute the film, while Scott Rudin was originally going to be an executive producer on the film, but left because of allegations involving his behavior. Shooting took 38 days, mostly in Simi Valley, California. Much of the film was shot overcranked at a very high frame rate to accommodate extensive time remapping in post production. The Daniels said the kung-fu fight scenes were shot unusually quickly; for example, the fanny-pack fight was shot in a day and a half. Filming wrapped in early March 2020, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The first cut ran around 170 minutes.

▸ Visual Effects & Design

Visual effects post-production for the film was done in-house, after the Daniels' negative experience with a dedicated post-production studio for their 2016 film Swiss Army Man. Instead, the filmmakers assembled a small team of eight artists headed by Zak Stoltz, who produced visual effects using Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro, and used Resilio Sync to share the large amounts of data once the pandemic hit.

For Deirdre's appearance, Kwan discovered a picture of a real IRS agent he found online, which Curtis liked and wanted to emulate. Curtis wanted the character to be as "real" as possible and used her real belly for the film, as opposed to a prosthetic.

For the rock universe scene, Runway AI was used to automate the process of rotoscoping shots filmed on a green screen, creating mattes that then allowed the rocks to be combined with other imagery.

▸ Music & Score

The musical score was composed by Son Lux, whose members are Ryan Lott, Ian Chang, and Rafiq Bhatia. Daniels asked them to approach the score individually, and not as a band. Lott said, "I think that the complete picture of not only who we are as a band, but also who we are as individuals and what we have accomplished and the places we've gone creatively individually, meant for them that there was a possibility that many of these universes of sound could be within reach with this particular trio."

Son Lux took two to three years to compose the score, which includes more than a hundred musical cues. The soundtrack album consists of 49 tracks and runs for more than two hours. It features several prominent musicians, including Mitski, David Byrne, a flute-playing André 3000, Randy Newman, Moses Sumney, Hajnal Pivnick, and yMusic. Two songs—"This Is a Life" featuring Mitski and Byrne and "Fence" featuring Sumney—were released as singles on March 4 and 14, 2022. The album was released on March 25 to positive critical response.

The film features several instances, both in audio and in dialogue, of the 2000 Nine Days song "Absolutely (Story of a Girl)". When Daniels contacted Nine Days vocalist John Hampson about using the song, Hampson enthusiastically agreed to record three alternate versions of the song for use in the film. Claude Debussy's Clair de lune is also prominently featured in the film, as the theme for Deirdre.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: Won 7 Oscars. 406 wins & 382 nominations total

Awards Won: ★ Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture ★ Dorian Award for Film of the Year ★ Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award for Best Film ★ Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form ★ Amanda Award for Best Foreign Feature Film (Q112605054) ★ Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay (95th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Picture (95th Academy Awards) ★ Dorian Award for LGBTQ Film of the Year

Nominations: ○ Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (80th Golden Globe Awards)

CRITICAL RECEPTION

The film garnered widespread critical acclaim. Audiences polled by PostTrak gave it an 89% positive score, with 77% saying that they would definitely recommend it. The Hollywood Reporters David Rooney called it a "frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven [that] is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun", complimenting the cast and score but found the handling of the story's underlying theme underwhelming. In her review for RogerEbert.com, Marya E. Gates lauded Yeoh's performance, writing, "Yeoh is the anchor of the film, given a role that showcases her wide range of talents, from her fine martial art skills to her superb comic timing to her ability to excavate endless depths of rich human emotion, often just from a glance or a reaction." Bramesco praised the Daniels for constructing a "large, elaborate, polished, and detailed expression of a vision", Amy Nicholson of The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Over its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, the movie's ambitions double, and double again, as though it's a Petri dish teeming with Mr. Kwan and Mr. Scheinert's wildest ideas." In her review for Vanity Fair, Maureen Ryan said, "Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve, and growing curiosity" adding that she "makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping." Adam Nayman of The Ringer referred to the film as "a love letter to Yeoh [and] extremely poignant, giving its 59-year-old star a chance to flex unexpected acting muscles while revisiting the high-flying fight choreography that made her a global icon back in the 1990s". In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Jake Coyle wrote that although it "can verge on overload, it's this liberating sense of limitless possibility that the movie leaves you filled with, both in its freewheeling anything-goes playfulness and in its surprisingly tender portrait of existential despair".