There are few actors and comedians who can hold a candle to the enduring impact Adam Sandler has had on pop culture, comedy and Hollywood at large.
Since his time on Saturday Night Live in the early 90s, Sandler has helped redefine the comedy movie genre with cult classic hits like Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison and The Waterboy. He’s also delivered some incredible performances in more drama-driven roles like Uncut Gems and Punch-Drunk Love, showing that his range extends far beyond the slapstick, juvenile comedy that he made him a household name.
Sandler has been a prolific producer of hit films over the course of his career, too, and many have earned him numerous awards and nominations. Looking to dive into his extensive filmography? Or want a refresher before the premiere of Happy Gilmore 2? Here are our top 20 favorite Adam Sandler movies of all time.
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Adam Sandler’s 20 Best Films
Here are the top 20 Adam Sandler movies from throughout his long acting and comedy career:
1. ‘Happy Gilmore’ (1996)
Happy Gilmore is arguably the most well-known and beloved Adam Sandler movie ever. Sandler plays the eponymous Happy Gilmore, a failing ice hockey player who has his sights set on the big leagues but can’t get past his poor skating and hot temper to make the leap. What he does have, however, is a mean slapshot. When his beloved grandmother’s livelihood and home are threatened, Happy becomes a professional golfer after learning that his slapshot can translate into an unorthodox but successful approach to golf.
Happy came to embody Sandler’s most common role: a hot-headed and immature adult who can’t quite get things together but has a heart of gold. Changing sports does nothing to temper Happy’s rage, and it contrasts perfectly with tamer, quieter nature of his new sport. The film contains numerous iconic scenes and lines, such as Happy’s fistfight with TV game show host Bob Barker (which featured the movie’s most famous quote, “The price is wrong, @#$%&!”).
2. ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ (2002)
Widely considered his best overall film, Punch-Drunk Love was one of the public’s earliest looks at Sandler in a more serious role. He plays a lonely, socially anxious salesman who becomes the victim of an extortion scam. Meanwhile, he’s trying to overcome his emotional instability to build a healthy relationship with his love interest, Lena (Emily Watson).
The film garnered critical acclaim, with many pointing to it as the best acting of Sandler’s early career. The film blends romantic optimism with stylized anxiety, creating a surreal but moving portrait of a man working hard to make major changes in his life.
3. ‘Click’ (2006)
Ever wish you could just have a remote control for life, pausing moments to get a little more time or fast-forwarding through the frustrating parts? That’s exactly what Adam Sandler’s Michael Newman stumbles upon in Click.
Another early 2000’s dramedy, Click follows Newman, a busy professional who has a bad habit of deprioritizing his family life, as he is given just such a device by a mysterious inventor and begins using it to mold his life to his convenience. But, all of the power comes with a serious price, he discovers in the end. Click serves as another early example of Sandler’s true potential as an actor, beyond the whimsically immature roles he had become typecast in at the time.
4. ‘Billy Madison’ (1995)
Billy Madison preceded Happy Gilmore by a year and became another of his most beloved early entries. Sandler plays Billy, the late-20s heir to a massive hotel chain. Billy’s laziness and immaturity eventually lead his father to pass over him to take over the company, instead planning to name another executive as his successor. To regain his position as heir-apparent, Billy’s father makes him return to school and pass all 12 grades.
Billy Madison was another early film that added to Sandler’s legacy of iconic characters, one-liners and classic jokes. Chief among them in this film was the recurring “O’Doyle rules!” gag, shouted by the O’Doyle kids who tormented Billy through most of his grade school re-do, and Billy’s declaration “If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis!” after he intentionally wets himself in solidarity with a bullied student.
Billy Madison offers up one of the earliest looks at the type of big-screen character Sandler would go on to make famous in other major films.
5. ‘Big Daddy’ (1999)
Big Daddy is another early example of a film that was considered primarily a comedy upon release but revealed a deeper, more emotional aspect of Sandler’s acting abilities. Sandler plays Sonny Koufax, a middle-aged law school student who lives as a slacking bachelor and funds his life through settling personal injury suits until his roommate’s young son unexpected shows up at his door.
He hatches a ploy to use the boy to prove to his girlfriend that he’s mature but eventually begins to build a legitimate bond with the kid. Unfortunately, the entire dynamic is built on a lie, leading to the more emotionally-charged second half of the film.
6. ’50 First Dates’ (2004)
Adam Sandler stars alongside Drew Barrymore in one of his most memorable romantic comedies, 50 First Dates. Set in Hawai’i, Sandler plays Henry, a marine veterinarian who works as hard as he can to avoid getting tied down in a serious relationship — that is, until he meets Barrymore’s Lucy. He immediately bonds with her and falls hopelessly in love but soon learns that Lucy was in a car accident that left her with amnesia, unable to remember the prior day.
With Lucy unable to remember meeting Henry each morning but nonetheless reciprocating his love, Henry devises an elaborate courtship plan to win Lucy’s heart day after day and help her remember it all.
50 First Dates features one of the most heartwarming and memorable endings to an Adam Sandler movie, solidifying Henry and Lucy’s relationship. Though it’s mostly a comedy, this film, too, portents some of the more serious themes and roles Sandler’s later work would focus on.
7. ‘Grown Ups’ (2010)
If any comedy film could be considered a supergroup movie, it’s 2010’s Grown Ups. Adam Sandler is joined by long-time friends and collaborators Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider as a group of old friends who reconnect for a lakeside vacation following the death of their beloved basketball coach.
This film has some serious overtones, but it leans more into the comedic. Grown Ups gave us some of Sandler’s most memorable scenes, including Bow and Arrow Roulette and explaining what “getting wasted” means to a child, who then declares that she wants to get “chocolate wasted!”
One of Sandler’s most commercially successful films, Grown Ups is, at its core, about choosing family over ego and embracing who you are rather than who you once were.
8. ‘The Longest Yard’ (2005)
The Longest Yard is a remake of the 1965 classic, which follows a disgraced former NFL quarterback serving a prison sentence for drunk driving as he leads a group of other inmates in a football exhibition match against the facility’s guards.
The film features a heavy redemption arc for Sandler’s Pete Crewe and he shares the screen with the legendary Burt Reynolds, who played the leading role in the original. Other famous athletes, including Stone Cold Steve Austin, Bill Goldberg and Terry Crews also appear as players in the film.
9. ‘Uncut Gems’ (2019)
Speaking of famous athletes in Adam Sandler movies, A24‘s Uncut Gems features Sandler starring alongside NBA star Kevin Garnett in what many critics consider one of his strongest films.
Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a New York City jeweler with a gambling addiction, who loans Garnett a valuable gemstone that he believes enhances his playing abilities. That decision runs Ratner afoul of some loan sharks, requiring him to go to great lengths to reacquire and sell the gem.
Many consider Uncut Gems to be Sandler’s all-time best performance.
10. ‘The Wedding Singer’ (1998)
Robbie Hart is a sweet and lovable wedding singer in 1985 New Jersey who lives to make other people happy until he’s cruelly left at the altar by his fiancée. Crushed and disillusioned, Robbie starts intentionally tanking weddings out of pure bitterness.
Enter Julia Sullivan, a kind-hearted waitress engaged to an obnoxious stockbroker. As the two work together to plan her wedding, the pair begin to fall for one another. But with her big day approaching and his heart still bruised, Robbie has to decide whether to let his chance at love pass by or win her over before it’s too late.
The Wedding Singer marked a turning point for Sandler that saw him begin to play a wider range of characters than we’d seen in Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison.
11. ‘Just Go With It’ (2011)
In Just Go With It, Sandler plays a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and pick-up artist who avoids long-term commitment by telling women that he is unhappily married. In a twist, he falls for a woman who wants nothing to do with married men. He concocts an elaborate lie, getting his trusted assistant (played by Jennifer Aniston) and her family mixed up in things, too.
Just Go With It is a high-gloss rom-com that mixes lies, misunderstandings and elaborate setups with family-friendly sentimentality and exotic visuals and was a commercial success. Sandler and Aniston played so well together that they teamed up later to make Netflix’s Murder Mystery.
12. ‘The Waterboy’ (1998)
We can’t be the only ones who want to yell “H2O!” whenever we hear someone say “Gatorade,” right? If you also grapple with that urge, it’s probably because of The Waterboy.
Sandler plays another of his most iconic early-career roles as Bobby Boucher, a middle-aged waterboy for a Louisiana college football team who is raised by his overprotective mother. Turns out, this waterboy’s decades of pent-up rage and frustration can be harnessed to turn him into a very effective linebacker.
The Waterboy was arguably responsible for more famous Sandler movie lines than any other, including the water taunts (“Water sucks! It really, really sucks!”), Rob Schneider’s iconic “You can DO it!” and Kathy Bates’ Louisiana-bayou living Mama’s “Foosball is the devil!”
13. ‘Funny People’ (2009)
Adam Sandler, Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill join forces in this ode to standup comedy written by Judd Apatow. It follows a comic as he grapples with a life-threatening illness and tries to mentor a younger, aspiring comedian trying to make it big in the competitive Los Angeles comedy scene. Sandler’s character is based heavily on himself, and his performance received critical acclaim.
Part dark comedy, part dramedy, part meta-Hollywood satire, Funny People leans more on emotional realism than Apatow’s earlier films and gives Sandler the room to explore regret, ego and self-destruction. The tone shifts between hilarious and melancholy — with long dialogue-driven scenes and unsanitized character flaws.
14. ‘You Don’t Mess with the Zohan’ (2008)
In one of Sandler’s wildest action-comedy films, he plays Zohan Dvir, the Israeli military’s top counterterrorism operative who dreams of becoming a hairstylist in New York City. So, he fakes his own death to pursue his dreams — but finds that he can’t so easily outrun his past.
Beyond its slapstick humor and sexual innuendo, Zohan explores some pretty deep cultural and political themes, especially that of the Israeli and Palestinian cultures.
15. ‘Mr. Deeds’ (2002)
Longfellow Deeds is a small-town pizza shop owner and greeting card poet living a quiet life in Mandrake Falls, New Hampshire. His world is turned upside down when he learns he’s inherited a $40 billion fortune from a distant uncle — the wealthiest man in America. Suddenly transported to New York City, Deeds must navigate corporate sharks, paparazzi and social climbers who mistake his kindness for naivety.
This one is also a remake, this time of 1936’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and drives home the same message as the original: that decency can survive wealth and power. It also introduced us to one of Sandler’s most memorable visual gags: Deeds’ foot, blackened by frostbite, used to rescue his love interest from a frozen pond.
16. ‘Spanglish’ (2004)
Spanglish is one of Sandler’s earliest emotionally heavy films. It focuses on two families: that of a Mexican immigrant named Flor, who hired as a housekeeper for the other, a wealthy family in Los Angeles. Flor speaks no English and is fiercely protective of her daughter, while the wealthier family is embroiled in an interfamily crisis.
John, the family’s patriarch, forms a quiet bond with Flor as she struggles to maintain her cultural values in the face of overwhelming American privilege.
The film is a poignant exploration of the importance of family layered against a backdrop of cultural dynamics and social critique. Spanglish is undeniably one of Sandler’s most powerful films and best roles, and it drew critical claim upon release.
17. ‘Hustle’ (2022)
Another sports-themed Sandler movie, Hustle follows a struggling NBA scout who desperately wants to become a coach and trade in busy life on the road for more time with his family. He discovers a generational talent playing street basketball in Spain, and his fortunes begin to turn.
Hustle is a heavy sports drama that combines the underdog story formula with documentary-style realism, especially in training sequences and game scenes. Bo is played by a real-life former NBA player, Juancho Hernangómez, and Sandler’s performance is as emotionally deep as he’s ever been on camera, far from his comedic default.
18. ‘Murder Mystery’ (2019)
Sandler reunites with Jennifer Aniston for the first time since Just Go with It in 2019’s Murder Mystery. He plays a New York City cop who dreams of becoming a detective but hasn’t been able to get promoted. He takes his wife, a murder mystery-obsessed hairdresser, on a long-delayed European vacation, but things take a surprising turn when they find themselves as the prime suspects in a murder.
Murder Mystery combines the classic who-dun-it model with Sandler’s brand of husband-wife banter and physical comedy. The film was successful enough to spawn a sequel.
19. ‘Anger Management’ (2003)
Sandler teams up with Jack Nicholson in this odd couple comedy, where Nicholson plays Sandler’s anger management therapist after his character, Dave, is sentenced to undergo treatment over an altercation on an airplane, despite his objection.
Enter Nicholson’s zany Dr. Buddy Rydell, who begins controlling Dave’s daily life, meddling in his relationship and forcing him into increasingly uncomfortable situations — such as singing “I Feel Pretty” at Yankee Stadium — all under the guise of therapeutic healing.
The film leans into absurd scenarios, misdirection and public humiliation humor, and the Sandler-Nicholson pairing was a resounding comedic success.
20. ‘That’s My Boy’ (2012)
In this over-the-top comedy, Adam Sandler plays Donny Berger, a crude party animal who famously fathered a child with his teacher while he was still in middle school. Donny become semi-famous for raising his son, who he names Han Solo, as a single teen dad.
Eventually, his son (Andy Samberg) becomes a successful hedge fund manager who is about to get married. Days before the wedding, Donny shows up asking for money to avoid prison and has to reconnect with his grown son while keeping their true relationship a secret.
This is undoubtedly Sandler’s crudest, most over the top comedic performance. It disappointed at the box office but gained a cult following due to its extreme humor and quotability.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many movies has Adam Sandler been in?
Adam Sandler has been in over 70 feature films.
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