Happy Gilmore 2 Trailer Feels Like Watching Golf

Movies

Get ready to trade in your 9-iron for a hockey stick – or the other way around, depending on how far along you are – because Happy Gilmore is back on the green. Today, Netflix released a trailer for Happy Gilmore 2, the upcoming sequel to the 1996 comedy. In the previous film, Adam Sandler starred as Happy Gilmore, a former hockey player with anger management issues who entered a professional golf tournament to win the prize money and save his grandmother’s house. The sequel will find an older Happy getting back into golf, though the trailer is unspecific about plot details. Sandler returns in the title role, as do Julie Bowen as Happy’s love interest, Ben Stiller as an abusive nursing home resident, and Christopher McDonald as Happy’s legendary golf pro nemesis, Shooter McGavin. Joining them this time are Margaret Qualley, Nick Swarsdon, Bad Bunny, and Benny Safdie. Directed by Kyle Newacheck from a script by Sandler and Tim Herlihy (who wrote the original together), Happy Gilmore 2 arrives on Netflix on July 25, 2025. You can see the trailer below:

My first thought after watching the Happy Gilmore 2 trailer was that it looked kind of… sad. You can tell thirty years have passed since the original (which I enjoyed, although I haven’t seen it in a long time) because Adam Sandler looks old and tired. There are no jokes, just a bunch of nods to Happy Gilmore, like the happy place, the song “Magic,” the string of familiar characters, and Happy riding his hockey stick. It’s like he’s washed up and reliving his greatest hits, and maybe that’s the tone Happy Gilmore 2 is going for, but it’s going to have to work hard to wring laughs out of that premise. Happy Gilmore had a lot of life to it, with Happy often losing control and acting out in violence. (Roger Ebert hated this about the movie; he could be a real fuddy-duddy when it came to comedy.) I don’t get that feel from the trailer, and it puzzles me why they went with such a sedate tone for the movie’s first ad.  I get (and hope) that they want to save some of the good laughs for when people see the movie, but I’d think they would want to whet people’s appetites a little more than a bunch of “Remember this?” moments.

All-time Shooter McGavin story pic.twitter.com/56IfxEKGMb

— Shooter McGavin (@ShooterMcGavin_) March 8, 2025

I’m not putting any nails in its coffin, though. It’s entirely possible that Happy Gilmore 2 will be a great follow-up to its predecessor. Everyone from the original who can come back is here, particularly Sandler, Julie Bowen (who somehow looks even prettier now), and Christopher McDonald. Sandler and Jim Herlihy also wrote the script, as they did for the first one, so the odds of it recapturing what made Happy Gilmore funny are as high as they could be. There has, unfortunately, been a directorial downgrade, with Happy Gilmore’s Dennis Dugan (who also directed Beverly Hills Ninja and Big Daddy, as well as episodes of NYPD Blue and Moonlighting) being replaced by Kyle Newacheck, who directed Sandler’s more recent Murder Mystery and something called Game Over, Man. But it’s most likely not a big deal; I tend to think Sandler is probably running the show on this one. And Newacheck has directed some television as well, like an episode of Parks and Recreation. There’s also Netflix’s involvement; aside from their recent string of collaborations with Adam Sandler, Adam Devine has said they’re the only place where you can get a comedy made nowadays without having to make it woke, so again, the odds of Happy Gilmore 2 being good are the best they could be. It would be nice if this ended up being the sequel we never knew we needed, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Let us know what you think of the Happy Gilmore 2 trailer in the comments!

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