Congratulations, You Just Made Sure Netflix Make More Terrible Adam Sandler Movies
Murder Mystery is now a record-breaking comedy. Brilliant.
Adam Sandler deserves a lot more than what Adam Sandler signs him up to do sometimes.
The comedy actor - and exceptional stand-up talent - is a gifted dramatic actor and has proved himself capable of some of the most heart-warming comedy performances over the years. Sadly, there's an almost direct correlation between how good his movies are and how little people go to see them.
Punch Drunk Love? Brilliant, but it made no money. Funny People? Beautiful, touching, funny - didn't make its budget back. Reign Over Me? Great, but not profitable. There's a pretty firmly established pattern of it happening over and over. And yet when he makes Grown Ups movies, people flock to see them. Hell, Jack & Jill made DOUBLE its budget. Something is very, very broken.
The long and short of it is that when Sandler signed up to his big bucks Netflix deal, the company was always going to want him to make the things that people want to watch. Regardless of critical reception, we'd be getting more of the Grown Ups material and little gems like The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) would be few and far between.
So far, that approach has bred one great film (mentioned just there) and a run of films that otherwise reads like this: The Ridiculous 6, The Do-Over, Sandy Wexler, The Week Of and now Murder Mystery. If you think that sounds like a fun time, you're the reason why good films aren't being made.
His latest - Murder Mystery with Jennifer Aniston - is a mediocre, paint-by-numbers comedy that is light on laughs and works incredibly hard to justify its existence. It has none of the complexity, pathos or charm of Sandler's best work, whether that's in dramatic roles or comedy ones. He's no longer even being the old goofball Sandler everyone fell in love with back in the early days, when there was something of the self-effacing vulnerability in his shining eyes (you still see it in his stand-up). He's just a machine, churning out a production line of meh.
And the punch-line, of course, is that it is a wildly successful film in Netflix's terms. The company just released details that confirm the comedy was watched by 30.87 million accounts in its first three days. That's 30.87 million people who watched at least 70% of the movie, making it Netflix's record-breaking, highest-viewed movie after release, surpassing Bright by a factor of almost three and beating Bird Box's 26 million from its first week. If the trajectory continued after those first three days, it could well have done twice Bird Box.
Seriously, what is going on?
It's not an offensively bad movie and kudos to Netflix and Adam Sandler for striking it rich with this formula, but at some point we have to all look at each other (because, yes, you can't write things like this without also being one of the viewers) and wonder whether we might be the bad guys.