At this stage, Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison Productions will probably remain at Netflix for the remainder of the actor’s career. After all, the streaming service are paying him huge amounts of money to continue hanging out with his buddies to make movies that he holds almost complete creative control over, and he’s repaid the company in kind by firmly establishing himself as the platform’s biggest draw.
Subscribers have spent a cumulative total of over 200,000 years streaming Happy Madison content, and the partnership’s ninth feature film should arrive later this year. Hustle sees Sandler returning to the sports comedy well that’s brought him great success in the past with the likes of Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy and The Longest Yard, and this time he’s got basketball in his sights.
The plot follows the actor’s Stanley Beren, a longtime sports scout who gets fired from his job. Unemployed for the first time in a long time, he stumbles upon an amateur player that he believes he can groom for success and use as his ticket back to the NBA. What’s unique about Hustle is that Netflix picked up the script from Legendary and pitched it to The Sandman, instead of the regular Happy Madison troupe being responsible for creating and developing the story.
None of his usual collaborators have been confirmed for the cast, either, with Queen Latifah, Robert Duvall and Ben Foster all set to play major roles. Adam Sandler‘s last Netflix vehicle Hubie Halloween landed a Rotten Tomatoes score of 51%, which was one of the strongest critical returns he’d ever seen for one of his comedies. Hustle, meanwhile, hails from award-winning filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar with a script co-written by Academy Award nominee Will Fetters, so it has the potential to be one of the actor’s best yet.
