Films usually don’t linger in theatres playing to sizeable crowds week in and week out anymore. In some respects we’re still figuring out how theatres work after the forced closures of COVID-19, a period that saw major releases delayed and studios experimenting with premiering some big titles in theatres and on streaming services simultaneously. Pre-COVID trends seemed to suggest a future in which only the biggest movies played multiplexes, more niche movies played arthouses, and everything else fell into a gulf between the two—which usually meant they either appeared on streaming services or found most of their audience thereafter a short theatrical run.

Could Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s success suggest a post-quarantine sea change? Perhaps not. It could be an instance of the right film arriving at the right time, one based on a very specific experience but with universal resonance. The same PostTrak surveys found 21% of the audience to be Asian-American(a 2018 poll found that Asian-Americans account for 7% of all movie ticket buyers). That undoubtedly provided a boost, but Willmore cautions against drawing conclusions about finding an underserved audience.

“The Asian diaspora in the U.S. is vast and varied,” she says. “God knows, even as the California-raised daughter of a Chinese immigrant, I found a lot of resonance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and also plenty of details about the Wang family’s lives that weren’t at all like mine.” “Part of the appeal of the film,” she continues, “is that it is about Asian American characters without being marketed as an Asian American film — its characters simply are, and just as relatable in all their cultural and personal specifics as anyone else.”

The more granular and accurate the details, the more real and relatable a film can seem, even to viewers without a shared cultural experience. As little as the two films otherwise have in common, Everything Everywhere All At Once is akin in that sense to another indie breakout of years past, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which didn’t hold back on the details of Greek-American life but featured characters, themes, and situations recognisable to viewers of any background. By getting into the specifics of Evelyn’s life, like her wariness at playing host to her visiting father (James Hong), because she suspects he’ll be uncomfortable with Joy’s relation with another woman, or the cramped apartment filled with Chinese decorations she lives in above her place of business,Everything Everywhere All at Once taps into universal experiences of loneliness and parental estrangement.”

Whatever the reasons the film has connected to an unexpectedly wide audience, that connection is impossible to deny. And even if Everything Everywhere All at Once’s success might prove difficult for others to replicate, it also proves this kind of breakthrough can still be achieved, and that a comparatively little film can play alongside big budget fare like The Lost City, Morbius, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, The Bad Guys, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. All those films topped the box office chart during Everything’s run. Most are in the process of vanishing from theatres (and many, seemingly, from memory) if they haven’t vanished already. Meanwhile, a movie about a laundromat owner’s transdimensional adventures in familial reconciliation plays on and on, challenging preconceptions about what moviegoers want and inviting other filmmakers to do the same.

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