Director BenDavid Grabinski on Future of ‘Scott Pilgrim’ After ‘EX’ Video Game, Filming Two Vince Vaughns for ‘Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice’

“Scott Pilgrim” fans got another hit of their favorite world earlier this month with the launch of new beat-em-up video game, “Scott Pilgrim EX.” And there might be more where that came from.

BenDavid Grabinski, who produced the Tribute Games video game in collaboration with “Scott Pilgrim” franchise creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, and previously created the Netflix animated series “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” alongside O’Malley, tells Variety he’s “open to doing ‘Scott’ stuff in any sort of medium that people want to make it.”

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“I enjoy kind of being Bryan’s sidekick, where it’s just nice to be a sort of a steward in that universe of stuff,” Grabinski said. “And it’s helpful, too, because when we finished the show and we told people that we didn’t think we wanted to do a Season 2, or there wouldn’t be one, I was like vaguely saying, ‘But there will be more “Scott Pilgrim.”‘ It’s because the game existed then, and we just couldn’t talk about it. So the process of how long these things take is, like, who knows? It’s not like there’s gonna be a Broadway musical, but if there was gonna be one, three years from now, I’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, by the way, we’ve been working on that.’ It could just be that thing where every few years, suddenly, you pop up with some new iteration of the thing in some other medium. As long as people want to see surreal stuff that takes place in Toronto, Canada, that doesn’t actually exist, I’m interested.”

On Friday, Grabinski releases his latest project: the sci-fi, action-comedy “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” starring Vince Vaughn, James Marsden and Eiza González. Available for streaming now on Hulu, the movie is meant to be a buddy-action flick with a time-travel twist. However, Grabinski (who both wrote and directed the film) doesn’t want audiences to get bogged down in the logistics of time travel and strived to make that part of the plot as simple as possible, explaining just as much as you need to understand why there are two Nicks (Vaughn) on screen.

“You know that [the time machine] worked,” Grabinski said. “You know the guy built it. You know Nick came back in time six months and you know the machine blew up. So you know they’re not going to be able to use the machine again. And you know that if anything happens to the present-day version of Nick, it’ll happen to the future version, which is all you really need to know. You know, we stab him in the leg, and then the future version of him has a scar on his leg. You sort of give people enough to know the dramatic stakes, and then it just becomes about the characters and what they’re dealing with in the moment. You don’t want it to feel like at any moment they could jump through time again and redo things. Everything they do has a finality to it. This isn’t like a movie that has dozens of loops or alternate timelines or whatever. It’s just, they got to survive the night, bare minimum.”

To Grabinski, the quantum physics of “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” were less of a headache than the production logistics on the sci-fi film.

“I’ll tell you something that’s more difficult than time travel, it’s shooting two Vince Vaughns,” Grabinski said. “It involves science and involves giant machines. It involves a bunch of people who really have to do the charts and graphs and figure out how to do everything. It’s 60% technical and then 40% just traditional performance stuff. But it’s figuring out how to have a guy, who can be a little loose and not stay on script, act across from himself when you have this computer-operated camera that’s as big as a house that you have to program and move to repeat a scene exactly the same.”

Grabinski added: “You spend a half a day with Vince’s one character, and then the other half with that [other character], and then have to replicate all of it with an earwig in your ear. The whole goal is that when the audience watches it, it’ll not feel like it’s difficult, and they’re not thinking about it and I think we achieve that. But while we’re making it, we unfortunately had to think about it a lot, which is not exactly my favorite thing to do”