Some movies feel like they’re on TV all the time. FX has been trying to force people to like Wanted for years, for example, and there was a period of time when Spike TV would take a break from Dr. Pepper Ten-flavored programming that only men would understand to show Star Wars marathons at every possible opportunity. Some movies, however, literally are on all the time. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption. Well, it’s not literally on all the time, but it’s still pretty tough to flip through every channel on any given day and not catch a single glimpse of Tim Robbins crawling through a tunnel of shit.
Now, thanks to an off-handed mention in a Wall Street Journal piece (via Uproxx) about how much money the film has made over the years—loads of money, by the way—we now know exactly 151 hours of basic cable airtime were spent on The Shawshank Redemption in 2013. To save you some time doing simple math, that comes out to more than six days’ worth. That may not sound like a lot in the grand scheme of things, but if someone were to spend all six of those days watching The Shawshank Redemption and doing nothing else, it would impact their life in a handful of interesting ways. They’d probably be continuously uplifted by its message of overcoming horrible odds, they’d probably consider putting up a poster of Rita Hayworth over that hole in their wall, their family would probably leave them due to an insane level of neglect, and they’d probably die from dehydration. A fun week, certainly.
The other important thing to note about all of this is that each of those 151 hours that Shawshank was on TV was another opportunity to remind everyone that it lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Forrest Gump, a movie that isn’t on TV nearly as often…but still fairly often.