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A fan favorite sci-fi road trip buddy comedy beams up streaming success

A sci-fi buddy comedy that's found long-lasting life as a cult classic has emerged as a Top 10 hit on a major streaming service.

paul

Longtime best buddies and regular collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost generally tend to bring a sizeable fanbase with them wherever they go, even if their most recent project didn’t fare too well.

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Prime Video’s sci-fi comedy series Truth Seekers was canceled after a single eight-episode season, but Pegg did admit that he’s hoping to get the band back together sooner rather than later, roping Edgar Wright into the mix to re-team the Three Flavors Cornetto trio.

In the meantime, audiences have clearly been checking out Pegg and Frost’s other sci-fi effort, with FlixPatrol revealing that Greg Mottola’s 2011 feature Paul is currently the fifth most-watched title on Hulu. Co-written by the duo, it’s a love letter to the genre’s 1980s heyday, with two nerds encountering an extraterrestrial on a cross-country road trip.

Paul

The star-studded cast features Seth Rogen as the title character, with support coming from Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Jane Lynch, Jesse Plemons, Jason Bateman, and Alien icon Sigourney Weaver, so Paul knows exactly what crowd it’s gearing itself towards.

It isn’t quite on a par with Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, or The World’s End, but over ten years later and it remains one of the better sci-fi buddy comedies of the 21st Century, a very specific subgenre that’s been known to throw up plenty of duds.