- "Everything Everywhere All At Once" almost ended with Michelle Yeoh's character singing "Barbie Girl."
- Editor Paul Rogers said this alternate ending didn't make sense after earlier scenes were cut.
"Everything Everywhere All At Once" could have ended on a very different note, the film's editor Paul Rogers told Newsweek on Thursday.
An earlier cut of the movie starring Michelle Yeoh ended with her character Evelyn Quan Wang singing "Barbie Girl" — a song by the pop group Aqua — in a parking lot, Rogers said.
Rogers said that the movie almost ended with Evelyn's husband Waymond, played by Vietnamese-American actor Ke Huy Quan, ripping up their divorce papers, per Newsweek. In this alternate ending, the duo then went out to a parking lot and launched into a rendition of "Barbie Girl" on an old karaoke machine, Rogers said.
"And then everyone in the party comes out of the parking lot and they all sing 'Barbie Girl' together. It's this really fun, strange musical moment," Rogers said to Newsweek.
But the movie's editors had cut an earlier scene where the characters sang the song together — so the "Barbie Girl" ending "just came out of nowhere and made no sense," Rogers said.
Instead, the scene that made the cut showed Evelyn at an IRS office filing her taxes with her family, while being able to connect with all the multiverses at once. The movie ends with a close up of Yeoh as she is snapped back to her original timeline.
Rogers added that the final version of the movie showed Evelyn "just barely trying to hold it together."
"Evelyn is still existing amid the noise, amidst the noise of infinite multiverses, and it's always going to be a struggle and it's not a classic happy end," Rogers told Newsweek.
The film's current runtime was about half an hour longer before multiple scenes were left on the cutting room floor, Rogers said.
"Everything we cut I miss," the editor told Newsweek.
"Everything Everywhere All At Once," directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, has grossed over $106 million at the box office, per IMDB. It has the largest number of Oscar nods this year, with nominations in 11 categories including best picture and best film editing, per IMDB.
Yeoh is also up for an Oscar for best actress for her role in the film.
Representatives for Rogers and Yeoh did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.