You would think Adam Sandler would have gotten used to criticism during his tenure at Saturday Night Live. While his man-child comedy alongside Chris Farley and David Spade was popular with his peers, critics were slightly less kind. A New York Magazine hatchet job described SNL during his tenure as “a grim joke,” singling out Sandler for childish behavior and boorish comedy.
For some reason, according to Far Out, Sandler expected better treatment when he began his film career. “Actually, when I made Billy Madison, I remember thinking, ‘It’s going to be fun when it comes out, and they actually write stuff about you and my parents will read it,” he told United Press International. “This is incredible. The last time I was in the paper was when I was in eighth grade and made the honor role.”
Oh, newspaper critics wrote about Billy Madison, all right. But Sandler would have preferred if his parents hadn’t read the reviews. “All of a sudden, I woke up that morning,” he said. “I didn’t know they were going to come at me and hate me and what I was doing.”
Sandler says he was seriously shaken after he got a whiff of the first batch of bad reviews. “And then I remember calling up my friends and going, ‘What are they writing in your hometown? Aah, them too, huh?’”
Perhaps Sandler would have felt better if Rotten Tomatoes had been established a few years earlier. (Billy Madison came out in 1995, while the review site didn’t start until 1998.) Sure, his parents would have seen reviews like Gene Siskel’s (“The latest entry in the American cinema’s investigation of dumb-and-dumber heroes”) and Variety’s (“Those unfamiliar with Sandler’s antics may begin to find him annoying sometime between the appearance of the Universal logo and the end of the opening credits”).
But Ma and Pa Sandler would have noticed something else: While Billy Madison got a 41 percent splat from critics, it was certified fresh by 79 percent of the people who pay to watch movies. More importantly, 49 grouchy critics weighed in on the comedy versus more than 250,000 delighted comedy fans.
While Sandler has received his share of glowing reviews over the years in critical darlings like Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems, he still devotes most of his time to inspired silliness like Billy Madison, gathering his usual cast of idiots to goof off in Hawaii while tossing off another #1 Netflix comedy. For his trouble, Sandler was the top earner in Hollywood for 2023, taking home $73 million as America’s preeminent dumb and dumber hero.
Buy your own newspaper and have it write something nice for your folks, Sandler. I think you can purchase one pretty cheaply these days.
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