The Adam Sandler flop that was supposed to do “what ‘Ghostbusters’ did for Bill Murray”
Across three decades as a major movie star, Adam Sandler has had more hits (and attempted more silly voices) than most comedy superstars can shake a stick at.
However, he isn’t immune to the occasional flop, including his first truly big swing, which was universally cast back into the fiery pits of hell from whence it came (metaphorically speaking).
In the late 1990s, Hollywood was Sandler’s oyster, and after honing his skills on Saturday Night Live, he starred in a string of knowingly juvenile, yet achingly heartfelt, comedies that connected deeply with audiences. From Billy Madison and The Wedding Singer to The Waterboy and Big Daddy, and all between were box office hits, with each one accomplishing the rare task of building on its predecessor and raking in more money. Over a four-year period, Sandler transformed from a sketch comedy guy trying his hand at making movies to the biggest comedy star in the business; then, he decided to get weird.
Until that point, Sandler’s movies were largely dismissed by critics as childish, low-brow, and dumb (which isn’t entirely inaccurate), but at least these silly and farcical outputs had one thing going for them: they were grounded in reality. These vehicles saw Sandler playing angry man-children who were good at golf or made their living singing at weddings, trying to prove they were mature by adopting a random five-year-old, or by going back to elementary school to show everyone they weren’t complete doofuses, which in some sense felt very relatable.
With 2000’s Little Nicky, though, the actor took his first crack at a sub-genre which is notoriously tough to pull off, and that is the special effects comedy. This time, he would play the bizarrely coiffed Nicky, the misshapen offspring of Satan and an angel named Holly, afflicted with a truly aggravating speech impediment, embarking on an adventure to stop his two brothers from destroying the boundary between good and evil, which would unleash hell on Earth.
From minute one of the film, all manner of ridiculous supernatural tomfoolery abounds, leaving most of the cast, including Harvey Keitel and Patricia Arquette, up shit creek without a paddle, while even cameos from Quentin Tarantino and the late Ozzy Osbourne barely raise a titter. It was also a laugh-free zone, leading to Little Nicky being Sandler’s first undisputed failure as a movie star, which, of course, critics hated, but then they’d hated everything he’d made before anyway, so that was no big deal. Instead, the thing that truly stung the star was that audiences chose not to show up in droves like they had before, seemingly leaving Sandler’s newfound popularity by the wayside.
All told, Little Nicky only made $58million at the box office, a mere fraction of Big Daddy‘s $234million from the previous year, and with its $85million production budget, when marketing costs were factored in, the film lost a ton of money for New Line Cinema, whose head of production, Michael De Luca, had bravely told The Los Angeles Times, prior to release, that the movie had the potential to do for Sandler “what Ghostbusters did for Bill Murray”.
That 1984 spooktacular blockbuster was a career-defining hit for Murray that forever vaulted him into the highest echelon of comedy stardom, and while De Luca’s prophecy of Little Nicky being Sandler’s specific ticket to that rarified air was misguided, the actor simply wound up accomplishing that very feat with another string of hits, which included Anger Management, 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard, and Click, in the ’00s.
To this day, Little Nicky is still seen as the redheaded stepchild of Sandler’s career, even by his most die-hard fans, and he never again took such a big gamble on his audience’s willingness to follow him into such bizarre territory, with 2015’s Pixels, an action-comedy about an alien invasion in the form of iconic video game characters, being the only time he’s returned to a big-budget special effects picture. That one was resolutely family-friendly, though, not a potty-mouthed, toilet humour-filled escapade like Little Nicky, possibly for the best.
