A24 held a limited release and then expanded. Word of mouth built. The film became the highest-grossing A24 release at that point, earning more than $70 million in North American theatrical release from a production budget of approximately $14.3 million. The numbers told a story: audiences who found the film wanted other people to find it too.
The awards notices followed almost immediately. By the fall of 2022, *Everything Everywhere All at Once* was the subject of sustained awards-season attention. Quan received recognition from nearly every organization that considered his performance: a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, a Critics’ Choice Award, an Independent Spirit Award, a Golden Globe. He was on the path.
Before the Oscars, the Golden Globes ceremony in January 2023 produced one of the season’s most genuinely moving moments. Quan won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. In his acceptance speech, he thanked Steven Spielberg — the man who had given him his first film role, who had seen something in a twelve-year-old in an open casting call in 1983. Quan had not seen Spielberg in years. They hugged that night in the Beverly Hilton ballroom, director and the boy he had once cast, separated by nearly four decades.
Spielberg had won his own Golden Globe that night for *The Fabelmans*, his semi-autobiographical film about a young man’s relationship with cinema. The fact of two people who had first met in a casting session in 1983 both winning at the same awards ceremony — one for the film that launched the other’s childhood career, the other for the comeback that followed it — was the kind of thing that sounds invented until it actually happens.