For those inside the golf bubble, it can be healthy to treat the work with a dash of levity.
Sure, everyone in the sporting world is paying attention when Rory McIlroy falls to his knees at Augusta National, but it’s probably safe to assume that only a few of the people inside your golf group chat heard about the latest granular changes to the OWGR. If you treated the latter with the same deadly seriousness as the former, you’d be a hard guy to hang out with.
But the problem with levity, for those in the golf bubble, is that we don’t spend nearly enough time celebrating the breakthrough victories when they actually do occur. Victories like, yes, Happy Gilmore 2.
It feels like a while ago already that the buzz around Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore sequel infiltrated the golf world. The biggest stars in the sport had congregated in New Jersey to participate in golf’s biggest movie since … the first Happy Gilmore.
The only difference this time was that Happy Gilmore 2 was coming to your screens with cult-fame status, not achieving it after the movie had already released, as with the initial iteration. The opportunity for smash-hit status was, in hindsight, much bigger than any golf fan or insider recognized at the time.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see precisely how smash-hit status looked.
According to Netflix (and as first reported by SBJ’s Josh Carpenter), Happy Gilmore 2 finished as Netflix’s second-biggest movie release of 2025 — delivering some 6.2 billion minutes watched, and falling short of only the international blockbuster K-Pop Demon Hunters in Netflix’s annual rankings.
HG2‘s success ranked it second of 39 movies released worldwide by Netflix in 2025, and set a Netflix record in July when it delivered 47 million minutes watched in its opening weekend. The film also delivered two weeks atop Netflix’s Global Top 10 chart, five weeks in the Global Top 10, and accrued more than 90 million viewers in its opening two weeks.
Of course, these numbers are more vague than traditional box office statistics, and they don’t give us a sense of the ultimate financial success of the film (which reportedly welcomed a production budget of more than $150 million, a gargantuan number even by today’s standards). But these numbers do give us a sense of the broader cultural impact of HG2 — and it is easy to say the impact was significant.
For Happy Gilmore 2 to end the year as one of the most-watched films on the biggest streaming network in the world is an enormous victory for golf, and a success story that deserves our attention as golf fans.
Levity is nice, but there’s nothing wrong with a little self-appreciation, either.
