Netflix expects to pass a milestone this weekend when it signs up its 100 millionth subscriber, the company said on Monday. But its users have already accomplished something even more incredible — they have watched 500 million hours worth of Adam Sandler movies.
About 98 million people are currently members of Netflix. What do those people do? Statistically speaking, it's very likely that one thing they do is watch Adam Sandler.
Since the release of Sandler's The Ridiculous 6 in 2015 — the first of an exclusive four-movie deal the star signed with Netflix — the company's subscribers have watched a collective half a billion hours of Adam Sandler, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in an investor letter on Monday.
The 50-year-old actor has appeared in more than 50 films and is popular for his low-brow comedy, which a New York Times critic said "will make your children stupid."
But people love it. After The Ridiculous 6 was launched on Netflix, it was viewed more in its first 30 days than any other film on the service. Last month, Netlix said Sandler had signed up to do another four films, meaning he will make eight Netflix exclusives in total.
Sandler's recent movies may be garbage — The Ridiculous 6 has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Variety said the film is "so lazy and aimless, it barely qualifies as parody" — but people watch them at an industrial scale.
So how much Adam Sandler is 500 million hours the equivalent of?
Let's put this in perspective using ~math~.
It's like watching the The Wedding Singer 312,500,000 times.
It's also about 4,386 dog lifetimes.
Or 731 entire lifetimes of doing nothing but watching Adam Sandler movies until a merciful death aged 78.
The Empire State Building was built using 7 million man hours of labor, so Netflix users could've built 71 Empire State Buildings in the time they spent watching Adam Sandler movies.
It's the equivalent of almost 63 million nights where instead of sleeping, people stayed up all night watching Adam Sandler movies.
That last number is important, as was revealed on a Netflix investor call on Monday:
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is trying to argue that sleep is a greater competitive threat than Amazon.