How Adam Sandler really feels about critics who hate his films

As Sandler admitted to AARP in 2022, the harsh critical response to his films “stings at times,” but he “doesn’t get too shaken” by it. To explain, Sandler told a story about his father. “Something wasn’t right with me. I jumped on stage or didn’t get an audition. I was upset and probably embarrassed too,” he recalls. “And [my father] said, “Adam, you can’t always be happy. People won’t always like you. You will fail.’ I said, ‘But I just want to be happy, man.’ … He said, ‘You won’t really know you’re happy unless you feel those other things.’”

This wasn’t the first time Sandler has addressed criticism of his films, either. In 2000, while promoting Little Nicky, Sandler told The Harvard Crimson that in producing Billy Madison, he didn’t care what the critics thought. “But now I realize that I didn’t go into this business to have a critic like me,” Sandler said. “I went into it to make people laugh.”

Similarly, in a 2004 interview with IGN about Spanglish, Sandler claimed he didn’t mind criticism in the early stages of his career. “I never thought about what people would say about me,” he said. “I was just a young guy excited to be a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to do what I had to do.” Speaking to The Independent in 2013, Sandler was even more blunt: “I could almost do the play by now write for her. But then [I] Remember, I didn’t come to film to please the critics. I went into it to make people laugh and have fun with my friends.”