The next time you scroll through the Netflix menu and skip over an Adam Sandler comedy, just know that you’re not exactly in the majority there. You’ll probably remember Netflix’s numbers from earlier this year suggesting that their viewers have spent more than 500 million hours watching Sandler comedies, meaning that the average user has watched 2.86 of his movies on Netflix alone. We can argue about the merits of Sandler as a filmmaker or Netflix as a distribution model, but when it comes the marriage of Sandler and Netflix, the results are hard to deny. There’s oil in them-there sophomoric jokes.

That brings us to The Night Of, the fourth and final movie on Sandler’s original deal with Netflix. We’ve known for a few months that the film is set in the week before a wedding, with Sandler and Chris Rock playing the fathers of the bride and groom (respectively), but it looks like the movie is now starting to fill out its cast with some Happy Madison regulars. Thus the news that Steve Buscemi - who has starred alongside Sandler in everything from Billy Madison to Mr. Deeds to The Cobbler - would be joining Sandler’s cast for The Night Of (via Variety), probably as one of the actor’s more generic weirdo roles. I’m going to take a wild stab and assume he’ll play the priest, because that seems like the sort of thing that Sandler would find funny.

While The Night Of will bring Sandler’s original contract to a close, it’ll hardly mark the end of Sandler’s Netflix career. The actor-producer signed on to make another four movies with the online distributor earlier this year, so odds are good that we’ll see a handful of films with some of Sandler’s regulars - and yes, that probably includes Buscemi - before the end of the decade. While it’s always good to see Rock and Buscemi in movie roles, the jury’s out on whether The Night Of will be anything other than the same generic comedy we’ve seen from Sandler over the past few years. Prove us all wrong, Adam. Make The Night Of the biting social and racial commentary none of us saw coming.

 

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