Netflix really scored a hole in one with Happy Gilmore 2, the Adam Sandler legacyquel that can’t stop setting course records. In July, the golf comedy nabbed the trophy for Netflix’s biggest U.S. opening weekend ever with 46.7 million views over three days. But that was light work; now, the film is moving onto the masters. Per Variety, Happy Gilmore 2 has officially set the record for largest single-week viewership since Neilsen’s streaming top 10 was first introduced. The comedy received 2.9 billion viewing minutes during the week of July 21-27, an impressive feat considering the film didn’t premiere until July 25.
With these numbers, Happy Gilmore 2 swipes the trophy from fellow Netflix original Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which previously held the record with 2.2 billion minutes in 2023. It’s also the best opening for an Adam Sandler film to date, all of which have collectively generated over 61 billion viewing minutes for Netflix. That long partnership between the streamer and Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions is really paying off.
While he wasn’t quite as effusive in his review for The A.V. Club, Jesse Hassenger still praised the film for falling squarely within Sandler’s mission statement. “In the scheme of Happy Madison’s second life on Netflix, Happy Gilmore 2 doesn’t stand on its own enough to rate alongside the company’s best work for the streamer,” he wrote. “But the sequel is another indication that Sandler is still undertaking his longtime mission of making silly comfort-food comedies with the stealth seriousness of older age.”
The fact that Taylor Swift purportedly loved the movie—which features a cameo from her boyfriend Travis Kelce— and helped promote it may have had something to do with its outsized success as well. “Happy Gilmore 2 had me cackling and cheering the whole movie!” she wrote in an Instagram Story. “An absolute must watch, 13/10, go watch it on @netflix as soon as humanly possible.” It would seem that many, many people heeded that call.
