Adam Sandler could save cinema (but he doesn't want to)

Telegraph

21-07-2025

With reddened arms and moistened brow, the hardy Hollywood executive gazes out across his fields and frowns. On the horizon languishes a tangled and overgrown plot: a place where comedy once grew, before he gave up on it, and whose once bountiful soils have since gone untilled.
There was a man who once worked wonders there – Adam Sandler, they called him – who for a couple of decades had cultivated farces, capers and romcoms which cumulatively grossed $3.9 billion worldwide. Then one winter 10 years ago, he and his folk vanished – scuttling off behind the vast iron gates of the Netflix factory – and cinemas never saw him again.
This Willy Wonka-like career move – a retreat that left him busier as ever, yet in certain respects, barely visible – is something that has made Sandler completely unique in movie star terms. Its commercial and psychological meanings take a little digging into, but its significance for cinemas is clear: survival has been that bit harder without him.
True, Sandler's films were not of the sort which typically troubled the Oscars, or Sight & Sound year-end polls. One of his last theatrical released comedies, 2013's Grown Ups 2, began with a white-tailed deer breaking into Sandler's bedroom and urinating in his face, setting the tone rather deftly for the 101 minutes of twaddle that followed.
But the sort of output made by Sandler and his production company Happy Madison once filled a crucial gap in the summer movie market. In late June or July, just as visual-effects fatigue was setting in, titles such as Big Daddy, Mr Deeds, Click, and the Grown Ups diptych would arrive – and often sold a great many tickets before the more refined autumn schedule kicked in. (Between 1999 and 2015, the films made by Happy Madison earned back an average of twice their costs.)
Yet when Sandler struck his extraordinary alliance with Netflix in 2014 – the streamer has since kept him on side with a series of four-film contracts, the last in 2020 to the tune of $250 million – it's been almost impossible to see his output on the big screen. Cinemas that would very gladly show his latest self-authored piece, a legacy sequel to his 1996 golfing comedy Happy Gilmore, will have to survive without it when it arrives on Netflix this Friday.
In the new film, Sandler's short-tempered golfing prodigy rediscovers his passion and flair for the game after a protracted spell in the (figurative) rough. As well as bringing back some members of the original cast – notably Julie Bowen as Happy's romantic partner, Virginia, and Ben Stiller as Hal L, the sadistic retirement home employee – it features a slew of demographic-tickling celebrity cameos, including the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny as Happy's caddy and Taylor Swift's American footballer boyfriend Travis Kelce.
Along with the crucial nostalgia and curiosity factors, plus Sandler's ongoing status as one of Netflix's marquee draws, this should ensure a swift trip to the top of the platform's most-watched list.
It follows the other seven what-you-might-call Purebred Sandler comedies Netflix has produced, such as the Western spoof The Ridiculous 6, or his Murder Mystery whodunits with Jennifer Aniston. Or his two tremendous recent stand-up specials, Love You and 100% Fresh.
Or the stuff from the arguably more upmarket directors who (correctly) see Sandler as one of the greatest actors of his generation – when he can be bothered to make the effort – which the streamer has also busily stockpiled. So if you want to catch him in, say, Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories or the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems, you'll almost certainly have to do that on Netflix too.
How many wads of hard Sandler cash have our cinemas missed out on? This is hard to call for a number of reasons – not least among them that his brute pulling power had apparently started to wane by the mid-2010s when relations with his prior patron, Sony Pictures Entertainment, began to sour. (More on this shortly.)
But a Happy Gilmore 2 theatrical run might have had similar commercial appeal to the the forthcoming Liam Neeson-led reboot of The Naked Gun; another revival of a beloved comic property last seen in the mid-1990s. Analysts are predicting a $25 million opening weekend for that one in the US alone – though just how far it might go is hard to call, given the near-total lack of recent comparators.
Mainstream studio comedies went all but extinct around 10 years ago, as the genre's gentler aspects were absorbed by fantasy franchises and rougher ones were rendered not worth the trouble by our increasingly shrill public discourse. It's hard to imagine Sandler getting away with That's My Boy – in which a middle-schooler is seduced by his female teacher, whom he subsequently impregnates, all played for laughs – even a couple of years after its 2012 release.
Hence both sides' enthusiasm for that unique and mutually lucrative deal. The films might still attract the odd bad review, but no traditional media launch means no broader media scrutiny, no online storms in teacups, and no humiliating stories about terrible ticket sales should an individual title fail to click with audiences. Nor is there an intricate global launch to manage.
The classic Sandler format, in which a cosseted man-child reconciles himself to life's responsibilities and obtains fame, fortune and/or an improbably hot spouse, is one which travels well – a rare quality in comedy, and one which makes him uniquely valuable to an international streaming platform. (When Netflix renewed Sandler's contract in 2020, it also revealed that its global user base had spent two billion hours watching his films since 2015.)
So what happens instead? Each film simply lands on the homepages of Sandler-friendly subscribers, hangs around the top 10 for a week or so, then quietly slides its way down into the great online content chasm, to be tripped over now and again by random menu scrollers.
This means that if you haven't seen (or even heard of) some of the films Sandler has made since joining Netflix, it's because the algorithm has decided you don't need to know. And given Sandler-brand humour is famously as divisive as it is popular – those who don't find his comedy appealing will be sure to let you know – that just makes things easier for all concerned.
That circus was what he had clearly tired of by the mid-2010s, and the feeling was somewhat mutual. Sandler joined forces with Sony Pictures in the late 1990s following the enormous success of his early 'big four' – Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy – and would replicate their formulas for the studio, with tweaks, over a dozen further features in 14 years.
But with the repetition, a certain jadedness set in. The 2014 hack of the studio's email servers revealed an internal complaint about a corporate fixation on 'mundane, formulaic Adam Sandler films', plus details of a disastrous pitch meeting for a Sandler film based on the popular American board game Candyland, after which the studio head had branded their golden goose an 'a--hole'.
Even Sandler himself seemed increasingly tuned out. In 2011's Jack and Jill, in which Sandler plays both a cynical ad executive and his obnoxious twin sister, he often seems visibly bored by his own screenplay – which, perhaps tellingly, is about a Jewish New Yorker whose considerable talents have led to him becoming a cosseted sell-out, and who is subsequently haunted by his perpetually blabbering and flatulent low-class shadow self.
There's a dark element of autobiography there – similar to 2009's Funny People, in which Sandler plays a gifted stand-up who goes to Hollywood and becomes trapped in a forever-cycle of making moronic films. The thing is, in Funny People, Sandler's character has leukaemia to shake him out of his rut. In real life, he had to make do with Netflix.
So why not retire, rather than go to Netflix to spend another decade making more of the same? Those with a weakness for armchair psychoanalysis might suggest the reason is rooted in Sandler's working-class origins. Born in Brooklyn long before it was fashionable, he was raised by an electrician father and nursery teacher mother, and broke into show-business via the stand-up circuit in his teens. By his early 20s he was on Saturday Night Live; fast forward to his early 30s, and he was already a movie star.
However, the performers he'd long identified as his peers – other self-made stand-up survivors such as Rob Schneider, David Spade and Nick Swardson – seemed to struggle in Hollywood without Sandler's patronage. And he was hit hard by the loss in 1997 of his SNL cast-mate Chris Farley, who died at the age of 33 from a cocaine and heroin overdose. So in the years ahead, Sandler would come up with cameos, supporting roles, and even entire Happy Madison features, just to keep his gang employed.
It's hard not to suspect he felt and continues to feel a responsibility, in some deep corner of his psyche, to keep ploughing on, and be the tide that lifts all ships. If he's found success at a level that eluded all these other guys he finds just as funny…well, it's within his power to provide karmic redress.
His streaming deal allows him to keep doing that, but the greater ease of it also seems to have whetted his appetite for meatier work. In all the time he was at Sony, Sandler made just two great Elevated Sandler films – Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People – and attempted two more, Men, Women & Children and The Cobbler.
In comparison, the Netflix years have thus far yielded The Meyerowitz Stories and Uncut Gems, plus three further valiant oddities (Hustle, Spaceman, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah) and the appealing prospect of the new Noah Baumbach project, Jay Kelly, in which Sandler stars opposite George Clooney, and is expected to premiere at Venice this year.
For that one, at least, Netflix has lined up a short theatrical run in November – a necessity to wriggle it into Oscar and Bafta contention. For just a few brief weeks, cinemas will have their former all-flapping, all-honking golden goose back in the fold.
Happy Gilmore 2 is on Netflix from Friday 25 July