There are no doubt many benefits to being Adam Sandler, and just one of the many is the guaranteed fact that anything bearing your name in any capacity is guaranteed to become one of the biggest hits on Netflix.
The star’s cavalcade of original movies as a writer, actor, and producer have run the gamut from the zero percent Rotten Tomatoes score of The Ridiculous 6 to the career-high 91 percent of his most recent effort You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, but the first full-length trailer for Leo has dropped at a hugely unfortunate moment.
The coming-of-old-age comedy finds Sandler’s title character – who also happens to be a lizard – making an escape for freedom after spending decades as the resident classroom lizard at an elementary school, with the reptile discovering he only has one year left to live serving as the catalyst for the adventure.
It all sounds fine and innocuous enough on paper, but when you consider the promo has arrived just hours after Netflix Animation had confirmed two in-development features would be shelved and incoming job losses are on the horizon, the timing isn’t exactly great when you consider the Sandman and his Happy Madison production company have the benefit of a $250 million first-look deal with the streaming service.
That’s not to say the timing is in any way suspect or intentional, but the optics nonetheless aren’t great of in-house features being scrapped and people being given their pink slips right before an A-lister luxuriating in the freedom of a quarter-billion contract gets to show off their contributions to the very same division that’s about to be restructured.