Filmmaker BenDavid Grabinski Breaks Down the Emotional Ending of Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

[This story contains spoilers for Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice.]

On paper, a buddy action-comedy called Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a tough sell. Throw in dashes of gangster, romcom, tragicomedy and sci-fi sub-genres, specifically time travel, and it becomes a near-impossible sell. But writer-director BenDavid Grabinski managed to defy the odds by securing major studio backing for his genre mash-up, an increasingly rare feat in an era where studio marketing departments prefer films that are more clear-cut.

Grabinski was in the middle of co-showrunning the anime series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023) when his producer Andrew Lazar took the initiative and brought his pandemic-era script to 20th Century. With the room already warm, Grabinski met up with studio brass a few days later to offer his own Mike & Nick pitch that would lead to a handshake and signature.

20th is a fitting home for Mike & Nick, especially since studio head Steve Asbell has been championing bold genre swings from emerging filmmakers ever since he took the reins in March 2020. Grabinski’s Mike & Nick now joins the likes of Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator universe, Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You and Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen.

The Nebraska-born, Iowa-raised Grabinski ultimately juggled the smorgasbord of disparate tones with ease, amounting to one of 2026’s most enjoyable surprises thus far.

“It took me 20 years of working in this business to get to a point where a studio decided to make a big action-comedy that I wanted to do. [20th] somehow understood this movie,” Grabinski tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Mike & Nick’s March 27 Hulu release. “The final movie is not only the movie that was in my head, but it’s also the movie I pitched them.”

The movie centers on the aforementioned title characters. (The title itself is a tribute to 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice). Mike (James Marsden) is an enforcer on behalf of a loan shark named Nick (Vince Vaughn), however he’s secretly having an affair with Nick’s wife, Alice (Eiza González). Tired of having blood on his hands, Mike plans to leave the larger criminal organization they both serve, but not before Nick twists his arm for one last all-night assignment. The marketed swerve is that Mike is actually working for “Future Nick,” who traveled back in time by six months in order to right a major wrong involving his present self.As a result, Vaughn pulls double duty throughout many scenes.

The film may have a time machine, but Grabinski doesn’t burden viewers with an info dump as to how it all works. There’s a scene where Alice stabs the leg of “Present Nick” to establish that Future Nick’s fate hinges on the safety of Present Nick, but that’s really the extent of any time-travel rules. 20th did have some concerns about whether the audience would be confused by any of the time-hopping mechanics, but Grabinski always felt confident in his less-is-more approach.

“I mean this with no judgment, but I felt there was a lot of needless discussion and meetings about time travel logic. I felt very strongly that it was not going to be an issue,” Grabinski shares. “Then I made the movie, and they were like, ‘Alright, let’s show an audience to see if they’re confused.’ My assistant and I read all 550 cards with everything everyone wrote [at the test screening]. We also sat in the focus group, and nobody was confused.”

Getting into spoiler territory, Grabinski has compared Present Nick and Future Nick to Ebenezer Scrooge at the beginning and end of his arc in A Christmas Carol. Present Nick is selfish and angry, while Future Nick has realized the error of his ways, hence his desire to undo his previous actions. Present Nick eventually learns the same lesson and makes the ultimate sacrifice by taking a bullet that was headed in the direction of Mike, Alice and their impending baby.

From there, Mike and Alice rush Future Nick and a gravely wounded Present Nick to Wampler Memorial, a hospital that’s named after late entertainment journalist and The Kingcast co-host, Scott Wampler. The sequence includes a tear-jerking sing-along to Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” a needle drop that Grabinski secured well before their unexpected reunion in August 2024. But Present Nick succumbed to his neck injury upon their arrival, resulting in the simultaneous death of Future Nick.

Refreshingly, Grabinski opted to subtly convey Future Nick’s death with an empty backseat instead of deploying a well-worn visual trick.

“There’s just no visually interesting way to see him vanish that I either haven’t seen before or doesn’t risk breaking the style of the movie. It’s visually coded as a stylized action movie. Anything fantastical is offscreen or understated,” Grabinski says. “Whether he beams up or fades away, I wanted it to be in your imagination. But it was probably the riskiest choice in the movie. If the visual storytelling didn’t track in that moment, the movie falls apart. My hope was that it’s more emotional to feel his absence.”

In a last-minute twist, Alice reveals the existence of a second time machine. She and Mike track it down at a storage facility, and the movie ends with Mike inside the time machine, readying himself to prevent Present Nick’s death. After all, Future Nick and Present Nick saved his life twice. Grabinski again wants the audience to picture what comes next, as opposed to expecting a sequel. He’s not ruling out the possibility if inspiration strikes someday, but in the meantime, he’s honoring his original intention to just make a satisfying standalone movie.

“I don’t want to make a sequel now, but I might have an idea later on that’d be really great to do. I was just trying to have the movie function as a [standalone] movie,” Grabinski adds. “Mike and Alice are going to go get their friend, especially now that he’s no longer a piece of shit. I just wanted you to leave with the feeling that they’re going to figure it out. The closure is knowing that they will. You just don’t need to know how.”

That said, Grabinski does admit that he would’ve filmed some closing-credit scenes if time and money were no object.They would’ve depicted pieces of Mike’s mission through time.

“I’d have a funny end-credit sequence where you see Mike tell Jimmy Boy not to jump out the window,” Grabinski says. “There’s some other lovable people that he could visit to make sure they’re okay, but whatever. You can imagine that he does all that.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Grabinski also discusses the meticulous process of capturing two Vince Vaughn characters without limiting the noted improviser’s tendency to deviate from the script.

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When did you write Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice in relation to Happily and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off?

I wrote the first 15 pages of it right after [filming] Happily [in 2019]. Then, in the spring of 2020, I was in prep as the showrunner of a TV show when some big things happened in the world. I got sent home temporarily and never went back. But I ended up writing the rest of the script during lockdown. Then Scott Pilgrim came together, and that took over my life for three years. I still wanted to make Mike & Nick, but I was too busy to do any work to get it going.

Then my producer, Andrew Lazar, went rogue a little bit and basically got it set up at 20th. He called me one day, saying, “Hey, so 20th is really interested in this movie. They want to know if you could come in on Monday and meet.” I was in the middle of voice records for Scott when I went in to talk with them, and we had a great meeting before making a deal.

So as soon as I was done with Scott, I jumped into the deep end on this one, and it was very nice to go directly into the next thing. It did get delayed a little bit. We had started making actor offers when the strikes happened, but all of that led to me talking about it today.

In Happily, you dipped your toe into sci-fi. With Mike & Nick, you put both feet in the sci-fi pool, but you didn’t fully dive into it. Do you loathe the idea of having to write sci-fi exposition?

Yeah, I immediately killed off the only guy who could give exposition. Then it could be about a bunch of lovable idiots who don’t know the science part of science fiction. I love science fiction, but I liked the fact that these characters don’t really have any business being in a sci-fi movie. That felt more fun to me in this case.

Your affinity for action cinema, especially Hong Kong action, is evident throughout Mike & Nick.

I’ve wanted to make action movies my whole life. I also like combining genres, so this is my version of the buddy action-comedy. I had been trying to make another movie for almost a decade. It was just really expensive because it had car chases and all this stuff. Finally, I was like, I guess I should just make a small movie.

So I wrote the only version of a small movie I could think of that didn’t have explosions and car chases, and that was Happily. Then I could say, “Hey guys, I can make a movie, so what about the action ones now?” I just really love action. It’s one of the biggest reasons for making this movie. I then mixed all of these other genres into something that’s hopefully cohesive.

Yeah, the film has a little of everything: sci-fi, comedy, action, romance and drama. Filmmakers often tell me that studios tend to shy away from genre mash-ups like this, because they’re harder to sell than something that’s easily defined. Did you deal with any of that resistance?

No, I didn’t, but it took me 20 years of working in this business to get to a point where a studio decided to make a big action-comedy that I wanted to do. [20th] somehow understood this movie and really liked the script. During the meeting, I guess I just said all the things that made them not worry about it. I put a lot of thought into it. The final movie is not only the movie that was in my head, but it’s also the movie I pitched them. The only difference is I didn’t know what actors were going to be in it yet, but tonally, it’s what I was always trying to do.

Even though it has a lot of different genres, they understood that, at its core, this is a one-night-gone-wrong buddy action-comedy. It is a digestible type of movie that people love and enjoy. I was trying to make a hamburger. It might be a weird hamburger, but it’s still funny and entertaining. It’s about two guys who you really hope will mend their friendship, and that’s great stuff for movie stars to be amusing and charming. There’s all this other shit, but it’s still just that. It does have a time machine, but it’s not constantly looping through time like Rick and Morty.

I mean this with no judgment, but I felt there was a lot of needless discussion and meetings about time travel logic. I felt very strongly that it was not going to be an issue. It just felt very simple to me. Then I made the movie, and they were like, “Alright, let’s show an audience to see if they’re confused.” And nobody was, which is a miracle. My assistant and I read all 550 cards with everything everyone wrote [at the test screening]. We also sat in the focus group, and nobody was confused. So that was the only thing the studio was worried about because time travel can lead to headaches, but we luckily didn’t have that problem.

Shooting an actor in a double role must be incredibly complicated and tedious. Was the creation of two Vince Vaughn characters as arduous as I’m imagining?

It was the biggest pain in the ass of my entire life, but it was completely worth it. I knew what I was getting into. My role when I was writing the script was to think of the most creatively or emotionally satisfying thing that can happen at any moment. I’d ask myself, What is the most entertaining version of this movie? I wasn’t thinking, How much of a pain in the ass is it going to be to execute this? I never turned on that part of my brain that knew this was going to be difficult.

Then I hired a brilliant actor [in Vince] who isn’t always on-book. He can have a loose energy for what is a really regimented, complicated process, one where a gigantic computer-operated camera has to repeat a shot. We’d spend half a day with Vince as one character, and then he’d come back as his other character who has to interact with himself and other characters. So you don’t want to creatively hinder an actor’s process, but this [filmmaking] process was inherently mechanical.

I could have hired an actor who wasn’t as good —someone who’s very much like, “It must be exactly what is written, to the syllable. I can mechanically do this.” But I didn’t want the movie to have that kind of energy. I wanted it to feel a little loose. I wrote almost everything that’s in the movie, but sometimes, we would shift or swap lines on set. There was still a process of discovery, and I didn’t want to lock anyone into anything.

Vince had never done anything like this before, so we both had to figure it out. I spent a lot of time in prep figuring out how to do it technically, and then he had to figure out how to do his process in this way. I wanted it to feel effortless when you watch the movie, and that was its own challenge. I didn’t want you distracted by the fact that there’s two of him. I want you to watch it like there’s two different actors. The hope is that you’re engaged by what’s happening and not wondering how I did it.

Stephen Root and the Cronenberg for President t-shirt have now been included in Happily, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and Mike & Nick. Are these through-lines your version of Sam Raimi’s Oldsmobile and Bruce Campbell?

Yes, actually. I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s literally it. The fact that I got the Cronenberg for President shirt in an animated show, I don’t know how the fuck that worked out, but it did. It’s partially an homage to a yearly festival in L.A. called Beyond Fest. They also host these periodic screenings, and they actually co-presented a screening of Mike & Nick at the Aero the other night.

I’ve been going to Beyond Fest since the very first one when they had a Goblin concert. One year, they did a retrospective with Cronenberg, and they used a t-shirt cannon to shoot Cronenberg for President shirts at the audience. I was originally only going to put the shirt in Are You Afraid of the Dark? It just seemed funny to me to have a kid wearing that. But I’ve kept putting it into things. [Writer’s Note: Grabinski rebooted Are You Afraid of the Dark? in 2019.]

Emily Hampshire —who plays Sam the cop in Mike & Nick [and was in the original Are You Afraid of the Dark?] —saw the shirt on the convenience store clerk. She then gave me a gift on her wrap day, and it was a Cronenberg for President shirt signed by Cronenberg himself. There was even a photo of him signing it, which obviously made me cry. It was a total surprise. She worked with him on Cosmopolis, and she was like, This will make BenDavid happy. So I don’t think I’ll ever get a wrap gift that good again, although I did get Oasis tickets from Andrew Lazar. Those are equally great wrap gifts.

Oasis announced their reunion right before you started shooting in September of 2024. Did you have reunion fever when you revolved the finale around “Don’t Look Back in Anger”?

I got “Don’t Look Back in Anger” 18 months before we shot the movie, and they had no intention of doing a reunion at that time. If I tried to get the song later when the reunion was happening, I never would’ve gotten it, and there’s no movie without that song. So I really lucked out that they were still in their “Fuck you, we’re never going to play again” phase.

I went to the Edinburgh [Scotland] show, and tickets went on sale during my last week of shooting Mike & Nick. It might’ve been the day before we shot the “Don’t Look Back in Anger” scene, so it was just a weird bit of serendipity.

Besides the Oasis tune, you have quite an extensive list of needle drops. One in the third act caught my ear because it’s the Traci Lords song, “Control,” from 1995’s Mortal Kombat. Did you explain that connection to your cast member Lewis Tan (who stars in the new Mortal Kombat movies)? Or did he recognize it himself?

I love Lewis. We had some sort of conversation about it, but I can’t remember exactly if he picked up on that. When I first showed the finished movie to Lewis at our friends and family screening on the lot, he walked up to me and was like, “Best soundtrack ever, bro.” So all I know is that he loved the soundtrack.

The end credits of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’s final episode is a remix of the Mortal Kombat theme. I got the guy who screams “Mortal Kombat!” in Mortal Kombat to scream the title of my show as the credits are listed off. So I’ve always got a little Mortal Kombat on the brain, I guess.

[Spoiler Warning.] I admire the way you executed the goodbye to both Nicks, especially Future Nick. You didn’t oversell it; you just subtly depicted an empty backseat. Would it have been a hat-on-a-hat situation to go from one demise to the other?

Well, there’s just no visually interesting way to see him vanish that I either haven’t seen before or doesn’t risk breaking the style of the movie. It’s visually coded as a stylized action movie. Anything fantastical is offscreen or understated. When they use the time machine, I’m not doing this gigantic visual ordeal. I wanted everything that you see in the movie to be living within this relatable buddy action-comedy and gangster movie. I never wanted to live in a sci-fi aesthetic. Whether he beams up or fades away, I wanted it to be in your imagination.

But it was probably the riskiest choice in the movie. If the visual storytelling didn’t track in that moment, the movie falls apart. I committed to a concept and asked myself, Will this track for the audience? Is it impactful enough to just see the empty seat? My hope was that it’s more emotional to feel his absence. So there was a lot of intention behind it, but I could have really fucked that up if it didn’t work.

[Spoiler Warning.] After that sad moment, you give the audience a pick-me-up by introducing a second time machine that can potentially save Nick. Do you genuinely want to make a sequel to save Nick? Or is it more about wanting the audience to imagine what comes next?

I don’t want to make a sequel now, but I might have an idea later on that’d be really great to do. I was just trying to have the movie function as a [standalone] movie. The ending, to me, is not, Let’s now go see what Mike did. We just know that he’s going to do it. We don’t know how, but we know that he’s going to make this right.

The emotional catharsis is that Future Nick redeemed himself by being as selfless as you could possibly be, and you see him make peace with it. That’s probably the first time ever he didn’t hate himself. So Mike and Alice are going to go get their friend, especially now that he’s no longer a piece of shit. (Laughs.) I just wanted you to leave with the feeling that they’re going to figure it out. The closure is knowing that they will. You just don’t need to know how.

If there was a world where I could do anything with an unlimited budget and unlimited time, I’d have a funny end-credit sequence where you see Mike tell Jimmy Boy not to jump out the window. You could also see Mike pivot some other stuff. There’s some other lovable people that he could visit to make sure they’re okay, but whatever. You can imagine that he does all that.

So maybe I’ll make a sequel someday if I come up with a story that people need to know, but I don’t have one right now. I just wanted the movie to feel like it functions on its own so that you don’t need anything else.

[Spoiler Warning.] Present Nick and Future Nick may be deep into middle age, but they suggest that it’s never too late to change one’s stripes. Do you actually believe that people can fundamentally change later in life?

There’s a line in the movie where Future Nick says, “People can change,” and Present Nick says, “Can they?” And Future Nicks says, “They can certainly feel less angry.” And I do think that’s true. We change in little ways every day. None of us are the same people we were six months ago. The older you get, the more you realize how worked up you’ve gotten about shit that doesn’t matter and how destructive that can be. Sometimes, you only can gain that perspective from hitting a wall and things going wrong.

Movies have hopeful messages like this because emotional catharsis in art is engaging. They can be messages you actually do believe in without getting pretentious or message-y. So I definitely think it’s true that people can become less angry.

There have been many storied feuds throughout Hollywood history. There’s even a TV show that chronicles some of them. I bring this up because your 20th Century stablemate, Brian Duffield, has led a yearslong smear campaign against you. What’s the root cause of this very real bad blood?

(Laughs.) It’s so funny because there’s probably no one I text more. I have a group chat with Duffield and Dave Green, the director of Coyote vs. Acme, and it’s just us goofing on each other all day, every day. The head of 20th, Steve Asbell, is also in on the bit, and it’s a joke for no one except us. It’s very amusing that some people think that there’s actual conflict there. If you Google my name, I guess the “controversy” comes up. There are people who are trying to figure out, Why does Brian Duffield hate him so much?

But I’m as complicit as possible. When No One Will Save You came out, I tweeted about separating the art from the artist. That led to people texting me, asking, “Why do you hate [Duffield]?” So it’s not the most responsible running gag for us to have, but sometimes you need things in life that amuse you.

I’ve never actually verbalized it in this way, so Brian is going to laugh really hard when he finds out about this. I’m going to text him and say, “I just talked to The Hollywood Reporter about our ‘feud.’” Hopefully, Ryan Murphy will turn it into a season of Feud that no one enjoys. I’m not knocking Ryan Murphy; I’m just saying that a season about our feud would be the most boring thing ever made.

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Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is now streaming on Hulu.