The Three Types Of Adam Sandler Movies

Adam Sandler in a scene from the film “Billy Madison” (1995).

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This may come as a shock to some of you, but Adam Sandler does not make very good movies. Sandler is taking heat this week after several Native American actors walked off the set of “The Ridiculous Six” because of racist and misogynistic jokes in the film.

But see, nobody’s really going, “I’m shocked an Adam Sandler movie was full of cheap, unoriginal jokes that punched down and play into antiquated stereotypes.” And that’s because Sandler, for the past two decades, has been one of the most consistent producers of that kind of content.

But how truly consistent is he? Riffing on my Will Ferrell analysis, I used Rotten Tomatoes and OpusData to find the critical reception and box office performance, respectively, of every film Sandler has been in and then looked at the group of movies in which Sandler played a lead role or was in the lead ensemble. Three basic groups of Sandler movies emerged:

The Paydays

“What I’m talking about is no more involved than cosigning a loan or joining a gym.”

—I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

Films: “The Waterboy” (1998); “Big Daddy” (1999); “Mr. Deeds” (2002); “Anger Management” (2003); “50 First Dates” (2004); “The Longest Yard” (2005); “Click” (2006); “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” (2007); “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (2008); “Bedtime Stories” (2008); “Grown Ups” (2010); “Just Go With It” (2011); “Hotel Transylvania” (2012); “Grown Ups 2” (2013).

Sandler does not make art. Sandler manufactures product. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. He’s not deceiving anyone. Ever since he became a leading man in comedy, you could take an Adam Sandler movie poster anywhere in the world, and anyone regardless of culture could probably give you a decent summary of the contents of the film.¹

Sandler, in these films, is basically store-brand cereal. Putting the credit “Adam Sandler” on a poster with a picture of Adam Sandler on it is using the same marketing strategy as putting “Corn Flakes” on the box of store-brand cereal that has a picture of corn flakes on it. Neither the store brand cereal nor the Sandler picture are improving the overall quality of American consumption. They’re each providing a baseline, predictable product that will perform consistently and make money for its producer. Your grocery store is not trying to score a surprise hit of the summer with generic Corn Flakes. Neither is Sandler. As long as the films make $200 million to $300 million on a $50 million to $85 million budget, everyone is happy. And you buy it because it’s cheap and will shut the kids up for a few goddamn minutes.

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The Pineapples

“Remember, you have to shove a pineapple up Hitler’s ass at 4 p.m.“

—Little Nicky

Films: “Airheads” (1994); “Bulletproof” (1996); “Little Nicky” (2000); “Eight Crazy Nights” (2002); “That’s My Boy” (2012), “Jack and Jill” (2011); “Blended” (2014).

Sometimes a Sandler movie fails. A Sandler movie does not fail because it’s bad — most Sandler movies are bad. A Sandler movie fails when it doesn’t make money. Some have suggested that Sandler movies are going downhill, but his movies were never on a hill to begin with. Sandler’s movies exist on a sprawling plain deep beneath the sea, ignorant of heights or valleys, only hoping to hit oil. These are the movies that did not hit.

And that’s the worst possible thing that can happen for an Adam Sandler movie.

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He’s Trying

“What exactly are we celebrating here?”

—Funny People

Films: “Billy Madison” (1995); “Happy Gilmore” (1996); “The Wedding Singer” (1998); “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002); “Spanglish” (2004); “Reign Over Me” (2007); “Funny People” (2009).

How did Sandler get to this point — making movies that don’t have to be good in order to “succeed”? The answer seems to lie in this eclectic set of seven films that fall into two rough sub-categories.

The first are the films that brought Sandler to prominence: “Billy Madison,” “Happy Gilmore” and “The Wedding Singer.” There’s a reason that his production company is named Happy Madison. Sandler was young and hungry, and his schtick was still relatively fresh — or at least it wasn’t 20 years old. When you watch the films, you can sense it: Sandler is trying. They are not necessarily great films, but they’re solid comedies. Some of the actors in these movies come from outside Sandler’s group of friends. There’s often an element of pathos in them. Sandler’s love interest is not several decades his junior.

In the other four films, Sandler has a lot of help. Sure, you could call “Spanglish” an Adam Sandler movie, but you could just as easily call it a James Brooks movie, or call “Punch-Drunk Love” a Paul Thomas Anderson or Philip Seymour Hoffman film, or call “Reign Over Me” a Don Cheadle-anchored movie, or call “Funny People” a Judd Apatow flick. Sandler is unselfish in these films.

Can Sandler be good? These flashes of collaborative brilliance suggest that the answer is “maybe.”

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Sandler is a prisoner of his own device. The collaborative instincts responsible for his best work are not found in the vast majority of the products he produces. He surrounds himself with sycophants and Kevin James.

I’m not shocked that Sandler is churning out some racist, misogynistic schlock. Nobody is particularly surprised. After all, we’ve been buying it for years.

Adam Sandler Has Finally Found the Limits of 'Satire'

A group of cast and crew members walked off the set of the comedian's latest film, The Ridiculous 6, after objecting to the comedian's treatment of Native Americans.
Does Adam Sandler have an expiration date? Does his particular brand of slapstick—humor that's infused with a wan self-deprecation, that manages to be simultaneously silly and sociopathic, that once found Sandler punching Bob Barker in the face while informing him that "the price is wrong, bitch"—hold up? Is Sandler's own price now, finally, wrong?

Recent events would suggest yes. Late last week, in the course of filming Sandler's newest project, the made-for-Netflix Western spoof The Ridiculous 6, a Native-American cultural advisor and several performers and extras walked off the set in protest. (Sample characters: Beaver Breath, No Bra, Sits-on-Face. Sample line: "Say honey: how about after this, we go someplace and I put my peepee in your teepee?") As Allison Young, a Navajo actress who quit after being asked to do a scene"requiring her to fall down drunk, surrounded by jeering white men who rouse her by dousing her with more alcohol" told the Indian Country Media Network, “We talked to the producers about our concerns. They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’”

Leave they did. In response to which Netflix gave an explanation that is so predictable as to be a cliche: “The movie has ridiculous in the title for a reason: because it is ridiculous. It is a broad satire of Western movies and the stereotypes they popularized, featuring a diverse cast that is not only part of—but in on—the joke.”

First, of course, members of that "diverse cast" walking off set in protest would seem to suggest that they are not, in fact, in on the joke. Second, though, there's the claim that Ridiculous 6 is a "broad satire of Western movies." Which brings us back to the half-life of Sandler's comedy. Is Ridiculous 6 abiding by, or violating, Poe's Law? Has Sandler earned the right to claim, as Netflix does on his behalf, the moral amnesty of satire?

Has Sandler earned the right to claim, as Netflix does on his behalf, the moral amnesty of satire?

Sandler's films—the fart-joke-studded comedies, at any rate, that he's best known for—are, of course, ridiculous. But slapstick and satire are extremely different things. With the Ridiculous 6 controversy, the Sandlerian approach to the world—comedy that is smug and self-deprecating at once, comedy that both celebrates underdogs and revels in the cruelties flung at the them, comedy that is accountable to nothing but itself—is attempting to claim the mantle of cultural criticism. Here is a collection of juvenile jokes, the stuff of the tween boys and locker rooms, colliding with a trend that is sometimes derided as "p.c. culture," but that can also be understood more broadly as empathy culture. Here is Sandler's ethic of whimsical sociopathy being forced to reckon with the occasionally inconvenient fact that movies operate society.

The films of Sandler's "ridiculous" genre do, indeed, violate Poe's law. But that's not because they're offensive. It's because they're insipid. Billy Madison andHappy Gilmore and Grown Ups and Jack and Jill ... these films give no indication that they are self-aware or remotely critical of the subjects they take on. They may deal, if tangentially, with serious topics—race (Blended) and gay marriage (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry) and, um, the Arab-Israeli conflict (You Don't Mess With the Zohan)—but they lack evidence of the intellectual infrastructure that is a basic requirement of satire.

Compare Sandler's stuff to the work of, say, Louis C.K., whose jokes take on sexism and entitlement and complicated ideas of privilege and the lack of it. Or to the work of Key and Peele or Sarah Silverman or Nick Kroll or Chelsea Peretti or pretty much any other comedian who's ascendant right now. Their films and shows and sets resonate with the culture. The questions society grapples with collectively—matters of race and gender and class—seem to guide them. There's a sense of animating generosity in their work, even when it involves fart jokes.

Sandler's films lack any evidence they're bolstered by the intellectual infrastructure that satire requires.

And then here is Adam Sandler, making a movie whose costumes don't bother to distinguish between the Apache and the Comanche and whose script involves the direction, "Sits-on-Face squats down behind the teepee and pees, while lighting up a peace pipe."

Last year, the Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri claimed that Sandler "might be the most important comedian of his generation," attributing the importance in large part to "the Sandler persona’s simmering, nuclear self-hate." As an actor, Ebiri noted, Sandler "plays both the shtick and the heart at the same level of non-commitment"—a tendency that "might be annoying to some (okay, many ... fine, most) critics, but it could be the key to Sandler’s appeal. Maybe it’s what makes him more like the average American."

Maybe. The problem is that the indolent sense of self-loathing extends, in Sandler's films, beyond the characters he plays. The loathing here is equal-opportunity. Fat jokes. Asian jokes. Women jokes. Everyone is a target; and the impression this gives is not of Sandler as a kind of omnivorous satirist, but rather of Sandler as someone who is willfully unthinking about his mockery of other people. As the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips put it, "People of color, to say nothing of women, who have been marginalized, patronized or humiliated by a stupid joke in an Adam Sandler movie over the last few years constitute the biggest club in modern Hollywood. And until last week, that club was one of the least heralded, if only because its members have been putting up with the demeaning treatment for a century."

They aren't anymore. And that's a good thing for filmmaking, even if it's less of a good thing for the making of Ridiculous 6. Sandler's comedy is based, above everything else, on entitlement. Even his slapstickiest characters suggest that the sheer fact of wanting—a woman, an inheritance, a trophy—is enough to entitle them to the objects of their desire. They are privileged, like Sandler himself, but they do the worst thing one can do with privilege: They take it for granted. Netflix's defense of its collaboration with Sandler is similar in its blithe self-absorption: The whole project is proposing to avenge a group of people who have long found themselves on the receiving end of Hollywood's mockery by way of jokes about peepees and teepees. The filmmakers are defining "satire" according to the people telling the jokes—rather than the people who are meant to be doing the laughing.

The Man Behind Adam Sandler's Movies on 20 Years of Adam Sandler Movies

Tim Herlihy never dreamed of writing comedy, never considered it a profession, even as he fell face-first into it, and today, isn't quite sure how comedy works. But he made Adam Sandler laugh. That's all it took. The future comedic partners met on their first days at New York University in 1984, roommates by chance. They went out for Chinese food (it was Sandler's birthday). Herlihy studied business. Sandler wanted to be the next Eddie Murphy. The two struck up a friendship. They drank beer in their penthouse dorm room (Budweiser, if they splurged). They bonded overAnimal House, Bill Murray, Scooby-Doo impressions, and Rodney Dangerfield. They traded dumb jokes. When Herlihy decided to write them down, Sandler suddenly had a stand-up act. At night, they drifted from the Paper Moon in Greenwich Village ($1.50 vodka tonics after 11 p.m.) to Folk City, around the corner. Sandler hit the stage. Herlihy wrote. The laughs kept coming. Sandler blew up. After graduation, Herlihy went to law school and Sandler moved on to television, movies, and Saturday Night Live. He kept calling his college buddy for jokes. Because Herlihy wasn't going to be a lawyer. He was a comedy writer, whether he knew it or not.

Little has changed since that first day at NYU, save for over one billion dollars worth of blockbuster comedies. Herlihy became Sandler's go-to writer and producer, joining him on SNL (becoming head writer for two years after his partner's departure) and together they formed their own Hollywood comedy factory, Happy Madison Productions. But for Herlihy, understanding what made it work remains difficult. "I used to do this thing for my kids' school where I talk to third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders about comedy," he says. "I hated it. I'm just so intimidated by these kids. They ask questions and I'm spouting my theories on comedy. I don't really have any great theories on comedy." So what does he tell the kids? What does he tell himself when he sits down to write a new Adam Sandler movie? "I just do what they did in Bugs Bunny."

Adam Sandler’s First Netflix Movie ‘Ridiculous 6’ Casts Taylor Lautner, Blake Shelton, More (Exclusive)

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Nick Nolte, Whitney Cummings, Danny Trejo and a ton of Happy Madison regulars will co-star

Adam Sandler has lined up a ridiculous cast for “Ridiculous 6,” a Happy Madison production that will be the first film under his groundbreaking deal with Netflix, TheWrap has learned.

According to insiders close to the project, Sandler will star alongside“Grown Ups 2” frat boy Taylor Lautner, three-time Oscar nominee Nick Nolte, “The Voice” judge Blake Shelton and comedian Whitney Cummings, as well as Happy Madison regulars Steve Buscemi, Rob Schneider, Dan Aykroyd, Will Forte, Nick Swardson, Terry Crews, Jon Lovitz and Vanilla Ice, the latter of whom stole several scenes in “That’s My Boy.”

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The cast is also expected to include Luke Wilson, Steve Zahn, Danny Trejo, “Saturday Night Live” alum Chris Parnell and “Breaking Bad’s” Lavell Crawford, according to sources.

See video: ‘What’s the Deal?’ With Adam Sandler and Netflix (Video)

Netflix declined to comment on the casting but confirmed that “Ridiculous 6” will be Sandler’s first Netflix feature and that production will start in February. Sandler wrote the script with frequent collaborator Tim Herlihy.

“Ridiculous 6” puts a comedic spin on ensemble westerns like “The Magnificent Seven.”

Insiders describe the roles as follows: Sandler will play man who grew up as an orphan among an Indian tribe. Lautner, Schneider, Wilson and Crews are poised to play his half-brothers, while the final half-brother has yet to be cast.

Nolte will play Sandler’s long-lost father; Parnell a bank manager; Lovitz a wealthy industrialist and Cummings his flirtatious wife. Forte and Trejo will play the leaders of rival gangs, while Buscemi will play a local jack-of-all-trades.

Also Read: What Netflix’s Movie Deals With Adam Sandler, ‘Crouching Tiger’ Are Really About

In a fun bit of casting, Shelton (who just hosted “Saturday Night Live”) is in line to play Wyatt Earp, while Vanilla Ice has been tipped to play Mark Twain.

“Ridiculous 6” was previously set up at both Sony and Paramount before the project moved to Netflix once Sandler signed a lucrative deal to produce four movies for the streaming company. The production pact was announced in October, and more projects will be announced in the coming months.

Sandler next stars in Sony’s “Pixels” and will reprise his role as Dracula in Sony Pictures Animation’s “Hotel Transylvania 2.” He’s also a producer on Sony’s upcoming “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” and an executive producer on Crackle’s original movie “Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser.” He’s represented by WME and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Why does Sony Pictures keep making Adam Sandler films?

Does he have an incredible 50-picture deal with the studio? Is he blackmailing Amy Pascal?

Happy Madison's films have, for the most part, received mixed to negative critical reception. As of June 2012, the only films to have received a 'fresh' rating are Reign Over Me and Funny People. Yet most movies, as per the table above, have been commercial successes relative to their production costs.

And they are SO expensive!

2007 - I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - $85 million
2008 - You Don't Mess with the Zohan - $90 million
2010 - Grown Ups - $80 million
Just Go with It - $80 million
Zookeeper - $80 million
Jack and Jill - $79 million
2012 -That's My Boy - $70 million
Ken Miyamoto, Produced screenwriter, former Sony Pictures script reader/story analyst, form...

Ken has 1,770+ answers and 35 endorsements in Movies.

Answer featured in Business Insider.

Because they make money.  

Adam Sandler has an almost guaranteed audience and demographic.  

While his films do have their mishaps, from a monetary perspective, Sandler is very consistent overall.  

That's My Boy was a flop yes.  The worldwide gross was just $57 million against a reported $70 million budget.  

However, his two films before and after turned a great profit:

• Jack and Jill - A critical failure, however it made $150 million worldwide against a $79 million budget.  A profit is a profit.
• Hotel Transylvania - A huge success for him.  $346 million worldwide against just an $80 million budget.  

Just Go With It, while not a notable Sandler film in my opinion (not terrible, but not great), grossed $215 million worldwide against a budget of $80 million.  

Grown Ups made $217 million against another $80 million budget.  

You Don't Mess with the Zohan made $200 million against a heftier $90 million budget.  

Click made $237 million off of an $82.5 million budget.

50 First Dates made $196 million off of a $75 million budget. 

Anger Management made $196 million off of a $75 million budget.  

Even Mr. Deeds, which I think is one of his worst, made $171 million off of a smaller $50 million budget.  

So as you go down his films with Sony, you'll see this constant trend of budget vs. worldwide gross.  It's likely that Happy Madison's deal dictates that they generally have to stick with an $80 million budget, give or take a few million.  

And you'll see that it's almost a proven formula.  

$80 million per film and mid $200 million per gross.   Only That's My Boy, his more art house dramatic turns in Reign Over Me and Punch Drunk Love (both low budget), and Spanglish, lost money in the box office.  And much of that was likely recouped when you figure in DVD sales, TV rights, etc.

So why is Sony always in the Happy Madison/Adam Sandler business?  Because his films are a proven formula.  He is perhaps one of the most consistent movie star working in the business in that respect.  

Beyond that, he's an amazing guy to work with.  Happy Madison is a Sony staple.  During my days at Sony, I worked with them a lot and they are very down to earth.  There is no diva attitude.  They don't have high demands.  They aren't assholes despite the money they make for the studio.  

Grown Ups 2 Made Happy Madison "formula" guarantees, with a worldwide take of $247 million off of, yes, an $80 million budget. 

Blended was made on a lower risk budget of $40 million, and will likely end up at a lackluster $60 million plus worldwide. 

Sure, we'll likely see a miss here and there, but overall his films make money.  Good money.