The human race has collectively spent a perplexing amount of time watching Adam Sandler on Netflix.
Together, Netflix’s 99 million users worldwide have devoted more than half a billion hours of their lives to Adam Sandler’s lowbrow humor since the December 2015 debut of The Ridiculous 6, Netflix’s first original film featuring the US comedian, the company said yesterday. Never mind that his recent projects have bombed in theaters and been torn apart by critics.
Five hundred million hours may not sound extraordinary compared to the 1 billion hours of YouTube people watch per day. But it equates to about three movies for each Netflix subscriber—or, an astonishing 57,000 years worth of continuous viewing.
What were humans doing 57,000 years ago? Not watching Netflix, that’s for sure. It was the Stone Age and cave paintings didn’t even exist yet. The earliest known cave paintings were believed to be around 40,000 years old (paywall), although there are older known sculptures and engravings.
Civilizations, which bred more unique art styles, didn’t form until much later—after 3,000 BCE—when agriculture allowed for food security and economic stability. The oldest civilizations were in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, and then Egypt.
As for Sandler, the comedian appears to be able to do no wrong. His critically panned titles are still the most popular original films on Netflix. The company just expanded a deal to produce even more of them. (He currently has eight movies on the platform, three of which are Netflix originals.) And, one of his upcoming projects, The Meyerowitz Stories, is being screened at the Cannes Film Festival this year.