In the least surprising piece of news you’ll read today, one of the ten most-watched movies on Netflix at the moment stars Adam Sandler. The actor is a regular fixture on the streaming service’s viewing charts, so much so that subscribers have spent a collective total of well over 200,000 years consuming his content and lapping up the derivative comedies that turned him into a critically bulletproof megastar.
Without fail, every single Sandler vehicle that gets added to the Netflix library will crack the Top 10, and if it doesn’t, then hell has probably frozen over. In a coincidental segue, Little Nicky is the one drawing the eyeballs of viewers around the world today, sitting at number 10 on the chart. Among the Happy Madison head honcho’s fans, it generally tends to be held up as one of his better and more beloved efforts, but those not so enamored with Sandler’s charms are decidedly less enthusiastic about it.
Rotten Tomatoes rates Little Nicky at a weak 22% with 115 reviews in the bag, while the story of the Devil’s three sons battling over the right to claim the throne was one of the rare Sandler efforts to bomb at the box office after earning less than $60 million globally on an $85 million budget.
You can tell that Little Nicky was a Hollywood studio comedy released at the turn of the millennium because the soundtrack boasts such luminaries as P.O.D., Incubus, Deftones and Powerman 5000, while the hard rock theme continues thanks to Ozzy Osbourne’s cameo appearance. Directed by Steven Brill and written by Tim Herlihy with the leading man doing a stupid voice, the movie is peak Happy Madison, so you already know where you stand on adding it to your Netflix queue or not.