Happy Ballerina

The box office is dog sh-t right now, and five years post-COVID (the start of it, I know it’s still around, a part of life now), movie-going still hasn’t recovered. Live sporting and music events are booming, Broadway is 95% back to pre-pandemic business, but movies are still struggling, as are other cultural institutions like museums and the opera (the irony of Broadway being fueled by movie adaptations is not lost on me). The slide started before the pandemic, audiences were already drifting away from movie-going by the late 2010s, thanks to new and/or improved at-home technologies and stagnating creativity in the mainstream industry. 

But it is worth considering that based on other, more expensive entertainments thriving, there’s no reason movies should be lagging five years on, and we all need to do some deep thinking about what it means that movies, once the most accessible art form, are being lumped in with the opera in the current climate. All of which is to say, there’s a lot of pressure on summer 2025 to deliver, and deliver BIG. Which is why it’s so f-cking depressing that Happy Gilmore 2 is a Netflix movie. It’s due on July 25, and it looks like the kind of broadly appealing comedy Adam Sandler dominated in the 1990s and early 2000s.

 

I wholeheartedly enjoy Bad Bunny as an actor. He has a screen presence that is infectious. It’s a huge part of why his SNL episode is so good, he easily brings the audience onto his side (but also the writing on that episode was spectacular). Happy Gilmore 2 also stars Margaret Qualley, Benny Safdie, and Travis Kelce, as well as returning stars Julie Bowen, Christopher McDonald, and Ben Stiller, as well as Happy himself, Adam Sandler. Plus, there’s a bunch of pro golfers. 

Sandler is a massively popular actor, a real Movie Star, and yes, I know he’s making bank at Netflix after wearing out his welcome at Sony, where staffers were bummed out by his increasingly mediocre output through the later 2000s and into the 2010s. It’s true, Sandler got lazy. I mean, as lazy as you can get and still release a feature film. Even the worst movie is a herculean effort on a lot of people’s behalf. But he fell into a creative rut, and it seemed like he was just using his movie deal to travel to beautiful vacation spots and goof off with his friends on someone else’s dime. Admittedly, a good gig if you can get it.

But there has been a revitalization in Sandler’s career in recent years, perhaps influenced by the Safdie Brothers. Uncut Gems came out in 2019, and since then, you can feel Sandler putting in more effort with films like Hustle and Spaceman. On the comedy side, too, there’s been a refreshing rededication to effort. Films like Hubie Halloween and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah aren’t great, per se, but they’re not awful, and more, they feel effortful. Like Sandler and his coterie of friends and collaborators actually tried. 

Comedy sequels make me nervous because rarely are they an improvement on the original. Usually, they’re not embarrassing at best. But Happy Gilmore 2 looks promising—I like that they acknowledge the game has evolved and Happy's mighty swing isn’t so unusual anymore—and more, it looks like the kind of movie that would put butts in seats. So of course it’s going straight to Netflix, where it will do cinema no good.

Which means films like the atrociously named From the World of John Wick: Ballerina HAVE to deliver. John Wick evolved from unlikely hit to a billion-dollar franchise, and now it’s branching out, hoping the franchise can support spin-offs (The Continental didn’t fare so well on TV). A new trailer dropped yesterday, and at the very least, this movie looks stylish as hell.

 

There are varying reports of how much Ballerina was reshot/retooled by John Wick director Chad Stahelski, running from months to mere weeks. Everyone’s always trying to downplay reports of reshoots, though, which never makes me trust reports of reshoots. At the very least, this is a film where the initial director, Len Wiseman, ended up incorporating scenes shot by someone else (Stahelski). From the trailers, you can’t really tell. Hopefully, we won’t be able to see the seams in the film itself. 

Much like Marvel blowing the Red Hulk reveal in Captain America: Brave New World to try and gin up interest in that movie, Ballerina is blowing Keanu’s cameo as John Wick in the hopes that his presence will get the Wick faithful into the theater for “the girl one”. We’ll see. Like I said, there’s a lot on the line this summer. Most movies need to do well, a few NEED to be BIG hits.

Here's Ana de Armas at The Ritz in Madrid.