The rise and fall of Adam Sandler

Later edit: Hi past-me, this is future-me speaking. I’d like to say you were wrong — Uncut Gems was a brilliant film — and it was brilliant because of Sandler’s performance.

I grew up in the 90s, a time considered by many the heyday of the Sandler’s career. His face was a constant appearance both on TV and on movie posters around town. But despite his success, I never really understood why people around me thought he’s so funny.

Okay, maybe the popularity of his dumbed-down approach to comedy made me react in a much more malignant way than he would (probably) have deserved. But in light of recent times, it seems that there are more of me around than I thought.

Just last September, Brett Bodner wrote that as the actor turns 50, we look at how his films have gone from ‘must-see’ to ‘avoid at all costs’. This would naturally imply that at a certain point his work was alright — something I think deserves some consideration.

Adam Sandler’s career as an actor

I chose to look into the performance of his movies and score them based on commonly objective measurement - so I took figures for all movies where he’s either an actor, a producer or a writer. For that I used:

• User reviews (IMDb, user scores on Metacritic, audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes)
• Critic reviews (Metascore and Tomatometer)
• Gross figures (Box Office Mojo)

What’s plain to see is that his early years didn’t rake in as much buck as his work from after the year 2000 did. While it’s true that he had been on a steady rise ever since he got into movies, it’s only after the early 2000s that his films started grossing more.

The same thing goes for his ratings: the very early years were really, really bad compared to what he released towards the mid-point of his career — and as the 2000s started closing, his upward slope started stalling.

I also created a metric I chucklingly called the Measure of Sandlerness — an average of user reviews, critic reviews and box office performance — and found that if we’re to look at his career as an actor, it’s very much a story of rise and fall.

From a timid start, the Sandman managed to reach his zenith between 1998 and 2010. Big hits that propelled him into stardom include The Waterboy, Big Daddy, Anger Management, 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard and yes — the original Grown Ups movie. While the taste of Sandler made these titles become relative success stories, it’s the same ingredient that made for some considerable flops.

Titles like Funny People from 2009 that didn’t seem all that funny slowly eroded the Sandman’s castle (despite some positive reviews). And the list continues: Jack and Jill, That’s My Boy, The Cobbler and the infamous Ridiculous 6 were comparative disasters that slowly pushed Sandler into taking up more animations.

But as luck would have it, he’s done more than just acting.

Adam Sandler’s career as a producer

Over they years he’s produced a fair few of the movies he’s starred in — and he’s been surprisingly stable when looking at his work from this perspective.

The Waterboy was his first production and stands out as one of his best. Relatively little fluctuation around the median followed for a few years, with some big peaks: Click and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry were (numerically, at least) okay, as were Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Grown Ups. Admittedly, it’s revenue that pushed these figures up. As I’ve previously discussed — using revenue as a means of gauging a movie is pretty unreliable, but the fact is that money pushes scripts into studios and actors onto movie sets. As revenue falls, so does studio support.

At any rate, Hotel Transylvania also spikes on this take — but since it’s an animation, it’s disputable whether we should put it in the same bucket.

Sandlerness-wise, it seems that he’s never really matched the overall success of his early productions. Despite his few accomplishments along the way, following the release of Pixels in 2015 the whole world mobbed around the news that his career was heading towards a painful and lonely end.

Adam Sandler’s career as a writer

Sandler has been actively involved in writing ever since his debut. He scripted his premiere movie called Going Overboard, which happened to be pretty bad. But he’s had a few sensible ups: The Waterboy, Big Daddy, Grown Ups and Hotel Transylvania 2 (the latter of which also happens to be his biggest grossing movie at the time of writing this).

So considering his shoddy beginning as a scriptwriter, Sandler has been on an ascending path which has only recently started plateauing — despite studios bickering around his cookie-cut way of building characters.

Some (hopefully impartial) endnotes

I’m a harsh critic of things I don’t like — but in all fairness, I’m still considering whether it’s possible that Sandler’s work might be worth something. And by extension that I’m just a pretentious jerk.

But irrespective of my taste, the numbers do seem to show that the Sandman’s day has come and gone. Scoring all of his work — so acting, producing and writing — all in one, shows that despite a few peaks that followed the late 2000s, his overall popularity seems to be going down.

Whether Sandler’s movies are part of a superior breed of comedy is ultimately something better left to the critics of tomorrow. Occasionally we look back and really do cringe at the things we once enjoyed. Whether this will indeed happen to humanity as it looks back at Adam Sandler’s career, I can only say I told you so.

Thanks for reading.