Adam Sandler makes movies for one person and one person only, and that person is Adam Sandler. You can’t argue with his results, though, with the actor’s filmography raking in over $5.5 billion at the box office before he brought Happy Madison Productions exclusively to Netflix, where the outfit has churned out some of the platform’s most successful original pics ever.
In fact, subscribers have spent the equivalent to over 200,000 years watching Sandler-related content, so at this stage, it would be more of a surprise if something from his back catalogue didn’t trouble the streaming service’s Top 10 most-watched list at least once. Pixels is the latest title in question, and it’s comfortably been sitting on the global chart all week, once again reinforcing The Sandman’s status as the company’s crown jewel.
Despite a solid pitch that can best be described as an 8-bit Ghostbusters and a proven director of crowd-pleasing family films in Home Alone and Harry Potter‘s Chris Columbus, though, this particular movie comfortably ranks among the leading man’s worst efforts. That being said, a Rotten Tomatoes score of 17% actually puts it somewhere in the middle in terms of the overall critical consensus throughout his run as an A-list star and reliable draw.
There’s definitely potential in the premise of a ragtag bunch of nerds fighting off an alien invasion, but any sort of inventiveness or originality is laid firmly by the wayside in favor of the standard lowbrow humor and forced jokes. Of course, nothing can stop the Adam Sandler juggernaut from rolling on, and at the time of writing, Pixels is still the ninth most popular title on the content library globally, a full week after it first crashed into the Top 10.