Netflix Users Have Streamed Half a Billion Hours of Adam Sandler Movies

Netflix released its first quarter earnings report on Monday, which contained an interesting nugget of information for Adam Sandler fans.

According to the streaming service, Netflix subscribers have spent more than 500 million hours streaming Sandler’s films between December 2015 and March 2017. As the company put it to shareholders:

“Just ahead of the release of our third film from Adam Sandler, Sandy Wexler, we announced the renewal of our deal with Sandler to premiere an additional four films exclusively on Netflix around the world. We continue to be excited by our Sandler relationship and our members continue to be thrilled with his films. Since the launch of The Ridiculous 6, Netflix members have spent more than half a billion hours enjoying the films of Adam Sandler.”

This is great for Netflix, sure, but it’s a disaster for film-making tastes in general. The Ridiculous 6 – which Netflix states as the beginning of this meteoric rise – has a 0 percent rating on reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with his other productions The Do-Over (5 percent) and last week’s Sandy Wexler (33 percent) performing only marginally better.

Apart from that, in terms of content, Netflix said that Dave Chappelle’s pair of stand-up comedy specials have become their most viewed ever. The company again snubbed its nose at live sports in its report, calling it “not a strategy that we think is smart for us since we believe we can earn more viewing and satisfaction from spending that money on movies and TV shows”. Earlier in April, Amazon reached a deal with NFL to stream Thursday night games on its Prime Video platform in the US.

A Behind the Scenes Look at How Netflix Is Creating TV for the World

Netflix also touched upon its localisation strategy, and said it plans to bring in support for Thai, Romanian, and Hebrew over the next few months.

In Q1 2017, Netflix’s revenue came in at $2.64 billion with a net income of $178 million. That was thanks to the price change in mid-2016, the company noted, along with “a small but steady migration” towards its highest plan: the 4-stream, 4K HDR tier.

And in terms of subscriber growth, Netflix added just under 5 million – 1.4 million in the US, and 3.5 million internationally – bringing the total to 98.75 million. The streaming service expects to cross the 100 million mark the coming weekend, and might even upset its domestic advantage by the end of the new quarter.