Get in the Hole! Happy Gilmore 2 Is Coming, and We're All In!

Adam Sandler is officially back as Happy Gilmore, and by now there's a full movie to talk about instead of another decade of interview teasing: Adam Sandler reprises the role in Happy Gilmore 2, a Netflix original directed by Kyle Newacheck that arrived in July 2025. Christopher McDonald returns as Shooter McGavin, which matters more than any other single piece of casting news here, because the original film doesn't work without a genuinely hateable rival waiting at the other end of the fairway. Julie Bowen is back too, but not for long: Virginia is killed off in the film's opening minutes, and that loss is what sends Happy back into grief and drinking and gives the sequel its actual plot engine, rather than just an excuse to swing a club again. Bad Bunny joins the cast as Oscar Mejías, Happy's new caddie, a former busboy who dreams of owning his own restaurant, a strange and pretty fun bit of stunt casting for a comedy franchise pushing thirty years old.

None of that would matter much if the original didn't still hold up, and it does. Happy Gilmore from 1996 is Sandler at his sharpest: a failed hockey player with a cannon of a slap shot and zero impulse control discovers he can drive a golf ball farther than anyone else on the range, and the sport's country club gatekeepers, McGavin chief among them, treat him like a stain on the clubhouse carpet. The Bob Barker fight, where the mild-mannered game show host beats the tar out of Happy during a celebrity pro-am, is still one of the funniest scenes Sandler's ever been part of, and it works precisely because nobody involved plays it like a joke.

That scene is also the sequel's real problem, and it's not one anyone gets to wisecrack past: Barker died in 2023, and there's no version of this movie that gets to just restage the fight and call it even. The film doesn't pretend otherwise. It gives Barker a real send-off instead: a callback to that pro-am fight staged at his grave, a cameo folded into a video game inside the movie's own world, and one last appearance that puts him in heaven. That's a stranger way to close out a joke than quietly writing the character out, and a more honest one too. There's a second, less sentimental problem the film has to solve as well: golf's relationship to being uncool has shifted a lot since 1996. Back then the premise wrote itself, a hockey brawler crashing a sport that still meant pastel sweaters and membership committees. Golf now has Topgolf birthday parties and sneaker collabs; the stuffy gatekeeping Happy was rebelling against isn't the dominant image of the sport anymore, so the sequel needs a sharper target than "golf is for snobs" if it wants to feel like satire instead of cosplay.

Sandler's operation has always run on the same rotating cast of guys showing up again and again, and that's not incidental, it's the whole model. Rob Schneider's pep-talk cameo, the "You can do it!" bit that turns into a full-blown catchphrase in The Waterboy, is the connective tissue holding a lot of this together, popping up in some form across a chunk of Sandler's other movies too. That repertory habit goes back to Billy Madison, the 1995 comedy where Sandler plays a rich, arrested-development man-child forced to repeat grades one through twelve to inherit his father's hotel business, and it's stayed intact ever since. Kevin James and David Spade both came up through those same years, and by the time Grown Ups rolled around in 2010, the actual joke of the movie was childhood friends getting back together, which is a pretty accurate description of how Sandler makes most of his films now. Big Daddy is the odd one out on that list, a solo Sandler vehicle about a slacker who takes in a kid to impress a girlfriend and ends up growing up because of it anyway. You Don't Mess with the Zohan shows the other half of the formula, the high-concept swing (an Israeli super-soldier fakes his death to become a New York hairstylist) that either works entirely on your tolerance for Sandler doing a bit for two hours or it doesn't. Hubie Halloween is probably the clearest preview of what this sequel is going for: Sandler in prosthetic teeth as the town punching bag, surrounded by a cast full of people he's worked with for decades, using a small premise as an excuse for that same crew to hang out on screen again.

That's really the bet with Happy Gilmore 2: not that a golf swing is inherently funnier at fifty-something than it was at thirty, but that watching Sandler, McDonald, and Bowen fall back into a rivalry this specific still means something to people who first caught it on cable as kids. It's a bet on muscle memory over reinvention. Whether that's enough depends on whether the new jokes are actually new, or just the old ones wearing a bigger belt.