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By now, we hope that most people realize that this year's box office "slump" was mostly caused by a flood of shitty movies. (We hate to keep bringin up Stealth, but hey, we didn't greenlight Short Circuit On A Plane.) Previously, the LAT has made a fun little game of making execs admit to their 2005 bombs, but today they try to pick the brains of some disaffected moviegoers, and in their effort seem to have stumbled across Hollywood's Chosen One:

Richard Troncone is doing his part to close the gap. The 54-year-old West Los Angeles resident, who works in the computer industry, sees three movies a week, always in the theater and even if the reviews are bad.

"How do you know a good movie unless you've seen some bad ones?" he asked, adding that his wife "thinks I'm crazy."

It's not just his fondness for what he calls "feeding off the energy of the people" in the theater that drives Troncone. Back in 1972, when he was in the Army, he saw 176 movies in one year. Now, he wants to top that.

This year he's seen 151 movies, including the one he took in Sunday: the Usher star vehicle "In the Mix."

Assuming for a minute that this is a real person and not the sudden, physical incarnation of the industry's collective wet dream, this man is in grave danger. As we type, members of the big studios' dark ops have already been dispatched to capture him. Unless he escapes to the safety of foreign (non-union) soil, he'll soon find himself strapped to a stainless steel slab in a "test screening" chamber deep beneath the Sony lot, where his brain will be extracted, placed in a simulated theater seat, and studied by scientists who will try to recreate the neurological sweet spot that causes a person to compulsively spend all of his disposable income on their product while having no ability (or desire) to discern quality.