In Netflix’s Hubie Halloween, Adam Sandler plays a sort of mashup of the kind of goofball characters from the 90s that made him a comedy superstar, from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore. While Sandler as a person has little in common with the zaniness of the characters he portrays, the actor admitted to Polygon that there is one aspect of Hubie Dubois in his new film that is close to his real nature:
“In real life, I get scared pretty easy. When I come home and the lights are off, I’m not excited, I don’t like that. [laughs] I’ll push my wife in there, I go, ‘What’s going on? Come on, come on, check out the kitchen.’ It’s pathetic.”
It is strange to consider the man who played Count Dracula, the foremost “creature of the night” in the Hotel Transylvania franchise, is actually too scared to enter a darkened room alone. Fortunately, Sandler’s fear of the dark did not get in the way of his making Hubie Halloween, which seems to be well on the way to being yet another hit for the comedy star.
In Hubie Halloween, Adam Sandler plays the titular Hubie, a well-meaning semi-loser who is obsessed with keeping his town safe during Halloween, whether the other townsfolk appreciate his efforts or not. Things get complicated when actual monsters invade the town on Halloween night, leaving Hubie struggling to convince his oblivious fellow-townsfolk of the danger.
Sandler’s character of Hubie is widely considered a pastiche of various characters from his earlier movies. But according to the actor, Hubie’s nervous tics and low-key method of dialog delivery is not just a homage to his previous work, but rather a method of conveying a type of personality that is almost pathologically afraid of causing offense:
“It came from when I was young, I think, I used to do that voice. It’s basically a guy who gets picked on a lot and he tries to stand up for himself but he doesn’t really say his comebacks too loud, he mutters them. So he feels like he’s being bold, but he’s kind of saying it low enough that he doesn’t get in big trouble.”
With theater-chains the world over shut down indefinitely, audiences have been starved for new cinematic content for a long time. Netflix has risen to prominence in such times, and the recent success of The Old Guard, Enola Holmes, and now Hubie Halloween has established the streaming giant unexpectedly as a leader in the production of film content.
Hubie Halloween was the final movie in Sandler’s previous eight-movie deal with Netflix. Clearly, the company is happy with the results of the deal, since it has already extended the contract to include four new movies from Sandler to keep fans entertained. Starring Adam Sandler, Noah Schnapp, Paris Berelc, Julie Bowen, Karan Brar, Kevin James, Maya Rudolph, June Squibb, Steve Buscemi, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ray Liotta, Hubie Halloween is streaming on Netflix now. This news arrives from Polygon.