Room was nominated for Best Picture at the 88th Academy Awards, despite having earned under $6 million at the box office when the announcement was made. The film would eventually rake in $36 million, but that’s still well behind Spotlight‘s $88 million, let alone The Martian‘s $630 million. In the parlance of the movie, Room is a shed surrounded by houses.
Horace and Pete is a family-owned bar next to a Dave & Buster’s.
Louis C.K. wanted complete control over his first post-Louie project, so rather than take Horace and Pete to FX or HBO, he filmed and distributed it himself through his website. The pilot cost $5 for fans to download, the second episode was $2, and the rest were $3, because, as C.K. explained in his e-mail newsletter, “this show is f*cking expensive.” By typical “prestige” TV standards, it’s really not — each episode cost $500,000, or half of what Jim Parsons makes every time he screams “bazinga” on The Big Bang Theory — but it is when the production isn’t being bankrolled by a network. For that reason, Horace and Pete, like the micro-budgeted Room, relied on word-of-mouth for C.K. to make enough money to fund the next episode. Well, here we are at the end of the year, and the show has appeared on numerous best-of 2016 lists among the expected big boys, like Game of Thrones and The People v. O. J. Simpson; it was even nominated for two Emmys, including Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for the masterful Laurie Metcalf.
But C.K. knows that some people aren’t going to pay $5 for an episode of television, which is why, nearly a year after Horace and Pete popped up out of nowhere, the show is now on Hulu. There goes your excuse for not watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7p1326tiCo
(Via Hulu)
