Movies Like
Movies Like Everything Everywhere All at Once
By Jordan A. · · 5 min read
Everything Everywhere All at Once was made for somewhere between $14 and $25 million by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who work as the Daniels, and it went on to win seven Oscars from eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian performer to win Best Actress and the first Malaysian to win any Academy Award. Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis won the supporting categories.
The reason it landed is that the multiverse is a decoy. Strip out the hot dog fingers and the rocks and what's left is a film about a woman with a failing laundromat, an audit she can't handle, a husband she stopped listening to, and a daughter she's losing. The absurdity exists to make the reconciliation survivable. That's a much harder thing to copy than the visual style.
So the picks below split three ways: the Daniels' own work, films that use a bizarre premise to sneak up on real feeling, and the movies whose visual grammar this one is quoting. Eight in all.
Start with the Daniels
Swiss Army Man (2016) is Kwan and Scheinert's first feature, and it is the same film as Everything Everywhere in miniature. Paul Dano plays a man stranded and suicidal who finds a corpse, played by Daniel Radcliffe, and uses it as a boat, a water fountain and eventually a friend. Some of the audience walked out at its Sundance premiere. It is also, underneath the flatulence jokes, a sincere film about loneliness, which is exactly the structure the Daniels used again six years later. Your tolerance for the first fifteen minutes decides everything.
Strange premises, real feeling
Being John Malkovich (1999) is Spike Jonze directing Charlie Kaufman's first produced screenplay. John Cusack plays a puppeteer who finds a portal into John Malkovich's head on the seven and a halfth floor of an office building, and starts charging admission. Catherine Keener and Cameron Diaz round it out. It took three Oscar nominations, for director, original screenplay and Keener. It's colder than Everything Everywhere and less generous to its characters, but the leap from absurd premise to genuine dread is the same one.
Palm Springs (2020) is Max Barbakow's debut from an Andy Siara script, with Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti stuck in a time loop at a wedding, and J.K. Simmons stuck there too and furious about it. It set a Sundance sale record when Neon and Hulu paid around $17.5 million for it, beating the previous record by sixty nine cents. It's ninety minutes, very funny, and about the same question Everything Everywhere asks: what do you do when nothing you do matters. It's on Hulu as of August 2026.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) is Edgar Wright adapting Bryan Lee O'Malley's comics, with Michael Cera fighting seven evil exes in a Toronto rendered as a video game. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans and Anna Kendrick are all in it before most of them were famous. It made $47.8 million against a budget between $60 and $85 million and was a flat commercial failure, then found its audience over the next decade. The editing rhythm is the closest thing to Everything Everywhere's on this list.
The films it's quoting
Kung Fu Hustle (2004) is Stephen Chow directing, co-writing and starring, set in 1940s Shanghai, with martial arts choreography supervised by Yuen Woo-ping. It became the highest grossing film in Hong Kong history on release and held that spot until 2011. The tonal register, cartoon slapstick sitting directly next to real emotional stakes, is the tradition Everything Everywhere is working in. If the fight scenes were your favorite part, this is the assignment.
The Matrix (1999) is the Wachowskis' film that made the "you are not who you think you are, here is your training montage" structure standard equipment. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss lead it, and it won four Oscars, all technical, while popularizing bullet time by ringing a subject with cameras fired in sequence. Everything Everywhere's verse jumping is a direct riff on the download scenes. It has been imitated so thoroughly that first time viewers sometimes find it familiar rather than startling.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and rewrote what mainstream animation could look like, mixing CGI with comic book technique: halftones, Ben-Day dots, chromatic aberration, characters animated on twos while others move on ones. Shameik Moore voices Miles Morales, with Jake Johnson and Hailee Steinfeld. It's the other great recent multiverse film and it uses the concept for the same purpose, which is a kid working out who he is. It's on Netflix as of August 2026.
In the Mood for Love (2000) is the outlier and the one that pays off best. Wong Kar-wai's film, set in 1962 Hong Kong, has Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as neighbors who work out their spouses are having an affair with each other and then spend two hours not acting on their own feelings. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bin shot it, and Leung won Best Actor at Cannes, the first Hong Kong actor to do so. The movie star universe in Everything Everywhere, where Evelyn and Waymond meet years later, borrows Wong's costuming, his greens and yellows, and the jerky step printed slow motion he used throughout the nineties. It's the slowest thing here by far, and worth it.
How to pick tonight
Swiss Army Man if you want more of the same filmmakers and can handle it. Palm Springs if you want the same idea at ninety minutes with jokes. Into the Spider-Verse if you're watching with anyone under fifteen. In the Mood for Love if you want to understand what the Daniels were reaching for in the film's quietest scene, and you have the patience for a film where almost nothing happens on purpose.
If you want the choice narrowed down for you, our movie recommendation tool builds a shortlist from titles you already rate.
Topics covered: everything-everywhere, sci-fi, multiverse, daniels, swiss-army-man, palm-springs, spider-verse, absurdist
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.