Everything Everywhere All at Once Expands

Load up your fanny pack, conceal your woodland creatures, accurately pay your taxes (no really, do actually pay your taxes... they're due on Monday), and then head down to your local multiplex because the critically-acclaimed multiverse hit Everything Everywhere All at Once is available for your viewing pleasure on nearly twice as many screens this weekend. After a limited run in major cities (only in 38 theaters as of two weeks ago), the film expanded nationally to 1,250 screens last weekend. But the massive upscaling didn't dilute the box office returns, earning the second-highest box office gross per screen of the week. As a result, A24 has nearly doubled Everything Everywhere All at Once's reach to 2,200 screens.

The mind-bending multiverse action comedy has been a triumph of old-school word-of-mouth hype. It's a conceptually-heavy original property starring a 59-year-old Asian woman (Michelle Yeoh) and written and directed by a team of guys (Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) whose only prior feature was essentially a 97-minute fart joke starring Daniel Radcliffe's corpse (Swiss Army Man). That's not exactly the model for success in the modern film industry. But here's the catch - everybody everywhere seems to love this movie and enthusiastically sings its praises to friends and family. Everything Everywhere All at Once has a critics' score of 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (93 percent audience score), an 8.9 rating on IMDB, and 58 percent of the film nerds on Letterboxd users scored it as a 5-star film (only 8 percent of users scored it below 4-stars). It's the very definition of a crowd-pleaser, and you don't need a third googly eye to see why.

The movie is a hyperkinetic feast for the senses as the mundane life of Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) gets flipped upside down when dimensional barriers get broken. She begins experiencing the branching paths of other versions of herself in order to stop a powerful dimension-destructing force. Without spoiling too much, the action-packed antics involve everything from her mundane husband (played brilliantly by Ke Huy Quan, who you may recognize as Data from The Goonies and Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) suddenly transforming into a bolder version of himself, odd digits, bagels, Jamie Lee Curtis flying through walls, rocks, a Benihana, a furry flail, and so, so, so much more. The fact that somehow this package is all tied together coherently with great fight scenes, wall-to-wall laughs, and emotionally touching family drama is truly a marvel. To announce the film's continuing expansion into new markets, Kwan shared a delightful clip of the first time the crew showed Yeoh the iconic, absurdly over-the-top music video for DJ Snake and Lil Jon's "Turn Down for What," which Daniels directed. Kwan also mentioned that UK release dates will be coming soon.