Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A multiverse movie about taxes, laundry, regret, and choosing love when nothing makes sense.
Everything Everywhere All at Once follows Evelyn Wang, an exhausted laundromat owner whose ordinary life is already bursting at the seams before the multiverse arrives to make things officially ridiculous. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s screenplay turns an IRS audit, a strained marriage, a fractured mother-daughter relationship, and a lifetime of missed possibilities into a wildly inventive action-comedy with a bruised emotional center.
For writers and film students, this is a sharp study in controlled chaos. The script throws universes, genres, languages, fight scenes, absurdist images, and philosophical dread into the same washing machine, but its dramatic spine stays clean: a woman who thinks she has failed at everything must learn how to see the people standing right in front of her.
I've chosen two versions to study. The first is the shooting script (aka FYC), which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The second is an early draft from December 2017. Pay close attention to what changes the writers made.
Everything Everywhere All at Once Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
By: Nick Runyeard
Everything Everywhere All at Once is useful to study because it proves that maximalist storytelling still needs a clear emotional engine. The screenplay moves through tax audits, martial arts, alternate lives, absurd comedy, family trauma, and cosmic despair, but the real story is Evelyn learning how to look at Waymond, Joy, and herself without flinching.
Craft Focus
- Chaos with structure: The script feels explosive, but the emotional spine is simple: Evelyn’s fractured family life becomes the key to understanding the fractured multiverse.
- Character through overload: Evelyn’s cluttered apartment, laundromat, tax receipts, party prep, father issues, marriage tension, and Joy conflict establish her inner state before the sci-fi plot fully ignites.
- Absurdity as emotion: The wildest ideas are not random decorations. Verse-jumping, Jobu Tupaki, the everything bagel, and alternate lives all externalize regret, nihilism, longing, and possibility.
- Kindness as action: Waymond’s gentleness is not treated as weakness. The screenplay gradually reframes kindness as a radical survival strategy in a universe addicted to noise.
Questions for Writers
- How does the opening mirror/karaoke image establish family warmth before the story snaps into chaos?
- How does the IRS audit turn ordinary paperwork into a pressure-cooker setting for marriage, identity, immigration, and failure?
- Where does the screenplay use absurd comedy to reveal pain rather than escape from it?
- How does Joy/Jobu’s multiverse despair grow out of the mother-daughter conflict instead of feeling like a separate sci-fi plot?
While reading, pay attention to how Everything Everywhere All at Once keeps dragging the cosmic back to the personal. The multiverse is huge, but the stakes keep returning to smaller, sharper things: a daughter asking to be seen, a husband asking to be heard, a mother terrified that every choice she made was the wrong one. That is the craft miracle inside the googly-eyed hurricane. The script lets everything matter, then shows why one ordinary act of attention might matter most.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, in which she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led.
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