Is Happy Gilmore 2 the best film of all time?
No one’s making that case.
It’s great fun and loaded with one-liners and silly moments that will make you titter — name another movie in which 85-year-old Verne Lundquist, known by golf fans for years of reverently calling the action in Amen Corner, delivers the line “gangster sh*t, indeed” — but also is not without its flaws. “The early and largely easy fun begins to curdle into inanity that simply drags,” wrote New York Times film critic Brandon Yu, “before devolving into an overextended fever dream of celebrity cameos.”
Is Happy Gilmore 2 the best marketed film of all time?
Now, that’s a question worthy of closer examination.
By our math, the promotional machine began whirring 16 months ago. That’s when one of the stars of the original Gilmore movie, Christopher McDonald, who played the deliciously smarmy Shooter McGavin, let slip on a Cleveland sports-talk radio show that he had learned of plans for a sequel in a recent meeting with Adam Sandler, who played Gilmore and co-wrote the original script.
“I thought, ‘Well, that would be awesome,’ McDonald said on the show. “So, it’s in the works. Fans demand it, dammit!”
The cat was out of the bag, even if the cast wasn’t. Two months later, Netflix made the news official, confirming that it had inked a deal with Sandler’s production company to stream a Gilmore sequel. In November 2024, the film enjoyed another surge of publicity when it held an open casting call for extras at a Morristown, N.J., hotel. Thousands of hopefuls lined the streets and waited hours for their evaluations, eliciting this quip from Shooter McGavin’s X account: “Everyone wants to meet Shooter. I get it.” That same week, Sandler revealed on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon that Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Travis Kelce would appear in the film, which caught the attention not only of NFL fans but also of supporters of Taylor Swift (more on her later), who dates Kelce.
In February 2025, more promotion, this time at the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open, where McDonald, appearing in character as Shooter, recreated the scene from the original Gilmore when Shooter swipes Happy’s coveted gold jacket — a made-for-social-media stunt if ever there was one. Then, on May 31, came the trailer drop, at a Netflix fan event in Los Angeles. “Fans went nuts,” Netflix content chief Bela Bajaria told an audience last week at the film’s New York City premiere. “It’s the best trailer performance we’ve had for any Netflix film.” This was a few days after a 12-foot-wide Happy Gilmore 2 golf ball first appeared above Times Square, on the mast usually reserved for the New Year’s Eve Ball.
If you missed that promo, perhaps you’ve seen Happy Gilmore ad spots from U.S. Bank, which sponsors the golf tour in HG2. Or purchased a Happy Gilmore meal at Subway (collectible cup included!). Or played Netflix’s Happy Gilmore video game, Golf Mayhem ’98 Demo, which, Netflix says, “mirrors key events from Happy’s first cinematic outing, putting you on the links as the Subway Kid himself.” Or played Spotify’s own custom Happy Gilmore game, which the music streaming service called “an audio-visual experience designed to tap into your love for the film, while introducing a whole new kind of storytelling.” Or made a run at snagging one of the limited-edition Happy Gilmore putters that Callaway dropped earlier this month and which almost immediately began appearing on the secondary market with four-figure price tags.
My personal favorite promo came by way of bourbon maker Elijah Craig, which marked the release of the film by offering “watch party kits” to residents of every U.S. town that has either “Happy” or “Gilmore” in its name (there are 14 in total, Elijah Craig reported).
If you somehow managed to miss all of that buzz-making, you probably have either seen the movie by now or at the very least read about it or overheard a neighbor talking about it. On Tuesday, Netflix announced that Happy Gilmore 2, in the first three days of streaming, had racked up 46.7 million views. If that sounds like a lot of eyeballs, it is. The audience haul represented not only the best-ever opening for an Adam Sandler Netflix film but also the most successful-ever U.S. opening weekend for any Netflix film. The original Happy Gilmore, which was released in 1996, also hugely benefited, drawing another 11.4 million views on Netflix. Among those masses was my 13-year-old son, who surely is representative of a new generation of Gilmore fans who knew little about Happy’s legacy until the sequel came to fruition. (Gilmore 3? Feels like a certainty, doesn’t it?)
The other stroke of Gilmore’s marketing genius was stacking the cast with celebrities and famous golfers. Maybe, like the Times critic, you feel that Sandler overdid it with the cameos, but however that decision might have tarnished the integrity of the film, it worked wonders for its reach. Fans of Bad Bunny, Post Malone or Eminem, who might otherwise have had no interest in a Sandler golf comedy, now had a reason to tune in. Among the other celebs in the cast, which drew from a wide swathe of pop culture: Jeopardy host Ken Jennings, chef Guy Fieri and WWE star Becky Lynch.
Getting Travis Kelce, the NFL star, in the mix, though, might have been the savviest move of all — less so because of his ability to activate Chiefs Nation and more so because of his girlfriend. On Friday, when the film dropped, Taylor Swift, who is selective about what she endorses, fired off this priceless plug to her 280 million Instagram followers: “Happy Gilmore 2 had me cackling and cheering the whole movie. An absolute must watch, 13/10, go watch it on @netflix as soon as humanly possible.”
Golfers might not have the pull of global pop stars, but the pool of Tour stars that Sandler and Co. recruited also was nothing to sniff at: Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler (dude can act!), Bryson DeChambeau, Rickie Fowler, Fred Couples, Lee Trevino, even Jack Nicklaus. There was only one notable omission — yep, that other GOAT.
On Monday, DeChambeau’s team published to YouTube the latest episode of his popular “Break 50” series in which DeChambeau and a guest teammate try to break 50 together from pushed-up tees. You get one guess as to who he partnered with.
Yup, Adam Sandler.
“This is a special one,” the video description reads. “Today I’m attempting to Break 50 with the one and only, Happy Gilmore. Go checkout Happy Gilmore 2 now on Netflix!”
As of this writing, the DeChambeau-Sandler video has amassed more than 5.3 million views.
The author welcomes your comments at alan.bastable@golf.com.
