‘Happy Gilmore’ Fans Are Bummed That the Sequel Won’t Be Playing in Theaters
The recently-released teaser trailer for Happy Gilmore 2 had everything a fan could want — from Happy’s trademark swing, to Shooter McGavin, to the return of Ben Stiller’s abusive caretaker character.
One thing it didn’t have that the original did, though? The promise that the movie would play in actual movie theaters. Per The Daily Mail, after the trailer dropped, a lot of fans took to social media to express their disappointment that the movie would, as the trailer noted, be available “only on Netflix.”
Don't Miss
“Would pay to watch Happy Gilmore 2 in a packed theater. Happily,” a fan wrote. “The new Happy Gilmore movie releasing straight to Netflix and not in theaters rattles me to my core,” another posted. One user suggested that the film would make “BILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS!”
The sequel is going straight to streaming because Adam Sandler has a $250 million deal with Netflix, which has produced movies such as Sandy Wexler, Murder Mystery, and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, which have been largely forgettable.
We’ll have to wait and see if the quality of Happy Gilmore 2 is also in the “put it on while doing the dishes” range, but for fans who saw the original movie nearly three decades ago, the sequel is a highly anticipated event that’s unquestionably worthy of a theatrical release. Plus, as we’ve mentioned before, comedies just work better with an audience because laughter is contagious.
Netflix has released some movies in theaters, such as Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery. But in that instance, it was because Johnson reportedly “pushed” for it, and the release only lasted for one week. And it was recently reported that Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia movie will be getting a two week-long IMAX run in 2026, the longest theatrical window a Netflix movie has ever received. But, again, that idea originated with Gerwig and she had to “fight for months” to make it happen.
Should fans continue to lobby for a limited release for Happy Gilmore 2, it’s possible that Netflix might reconsider. But Netflix themselves clearly aren’t interested in making money at the box office, they just want to sell the idea that people need to subscribe to Netflix. In the wake of the Narnia news, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos argued that “our core strategy is to give our members exclusive first-run movies on Netflix,” adding that “the Narnia IMAX release is a release tactic. We routinely release movies at theaters a couple weeks before to qualify for awards or to meet festival requirements and to prime the publicity pump a bit.”
So if fans want to see Happy Gilmore on the big screen, they’ll just have to pray that he somehow stumbles upon a magical wardrobe and ends up in that Narnia movie.
