John Oliver celebrates the end of the actors’ strike – sort of.
On Sundays Last week tonight, he noted that the 118-day strike ended after SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers last week (the deal must still be ratified by the guild).
“The SAG strike has finally ended, which means the movies will be back in production,” he began in the opening segment of his HBO show. “Although to be honest, I’m not even sure I need movies anymore since this 17-minute video came out of what I can only describe as a hamster Gatsby living his best life.”
He then showed about a minute of a video called ‘The Awesome Hamster Ball Pool Maze’, uploaded to YouTube by Homura Ham Pets, which earned €1.4 million in the four months it was online. (Watch the video below in its entirety.)
“It’s a complete masterpiece and it goes on for another sixteen minutes. I mean, Barbenheimer was fine,” Oliver said, referring to movies Barbie And Oppenheimer, which opened the same weekend. “I thought it was fine, but honestly it’s just not that good.”
Oliver was joking, of course. When his show returned with new episodes in October following the end of the writers’ strike, he expressed anger at the studios, accusing them of prolonging the strike.
“The Writers Guild went on strike and thankfully won, but it took a lot of sacrifices from a lot of people to get there,” he said. “And while I’m glad they ultimately got a fair deal and extremely proud of what our union has accomplished, I’m also furious that it took the studios 148 days to reach a deal that they won on day one could have offered. But hopefully this can encourage others, from auto workers to Starbucks baristas and healthcare providers, whether they are unionized or would like to be, to find power in each other. And within our specific industry.”
