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Mass murder
From Ebert's Answer Man column, from Will Lugar of Tulsa:
"In the review that you and Siskel did of "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer," you said the movie drained years, even centuries, out of the human "time pool." I did some calculations and learned that it's worse than you feared.
Let's say a bad movie makes $50 million. I'll round the ticket price out to $10. I suppose that's 5 million people who saw it. If the movie is 90 minutes, then 7,500,000 hours are wasted. A year is only 8,760 hours. So, the bad movie has wasted 856 years. The average lifespan in the U.S. is a mere 75 years. Therefore, the equivalent of 11 entire lives are completely wasted away because of this movie. This is a low example. Many movies make far more than $50 million, are longer than 90 minutes, and are watched repeatedly on DVD. Ticket prices are usually under $10. So in conclusion, not only does making a bad movie vaporize years of potential community service, it is mathematically equivalent to committing mass murder."
"In the review that you and Siskel did of "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer," you said the movie drained years, even centuries, out of the human "time pool." I did some calculations and learned that it's worse than you feared.
Let's say a bad movie makes $50 million. I'll round the ticket price out to $10. I suppose that's 5 million people who saw it. If the movie is 90 minutes, then 7,500,000 hours are wasted. A year is only 8,760 hours. So, the bad movie has wasted 856 years. The average lifespan in the U.S. is a mere 75 years. Therefore, the equivalent of 11 entire lives are completely wasted away because of this movie. This is a low example. Many movies make far more than $50 million, are longer than 90 minutes, and are watched repeatedly on DVD. Ticket prices are usually under $10. So in conclusion, not only does making a bad movie vaporize years of potential community service, it is mathematically equivalent to committing mass murder."