Everything Everywhere All at Once proved in many ways to be the multiverse movie of the year, even with competition from Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. With only a fraction of the budget of the MCU movie, A24’s masterpiece took its reported $25 million budget and turned it into a $103 million worldwide gross back in March this year. However, while the movie was a respectable 140 minutes long, editor Paul Rogers has explained why an additional half an hour was cut from the film before its release.

In one of the surprise hits of 2022, Everything Everywhere All At Once boasts a cast of Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis, and tells the story of Yeoh’s Evelyn Quan Wang who is drawn into a multiverse-spanning adventure that has a family story at the heart of its science fiction premise. While speaking to Screen Rant about the movie, Rogers revealed how a long, drawn-out ending was scrapped, along with an entire universe.

“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.”

Related: Ke Huy Quan Nominated for First Golden Globe for Everything Everywhere All at Once

How Did Everything Everywhere All At Once Become A Huge Word-Of-Mouth Hit?

Coming during the latter part of the Covid pandemic, Everything Everywhere All At Once could have followed so many other smaller movies into a grey area where unknown films seemed to slip in the last few years. However, strong reviews and word-of-mouth drove audiences to cinemas to see what the fuss was all about, eventually leading the film to become A24’s first movie to surpass $100 million at the box office. This may not be much of an achievement in the eyes of Marvel Studios and the like, but for A24 and similar studios, the worldwide gross was huge.

The movie was unanimously praised by both critics and audiences alike, gaining a 95% critic approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes with a slightly lower but still impressive 89% from audiences. In a time when negative audience reviews can significantly impact the earning potential of a movie at the box office, especially when most movies now only have a short window before hitting on-demand and streaming services, Everything Everywhere All At Once proves that sometimes strong word-of-mouth is the best marketing out there.