Three decades into a prolific, largely profitable yet uneven film career, marked by lazy comedies and sometimes self-indulgent feeling dramas, Adam Sandler finds himself in a bit of a roll on Netflix.
His latest real-feeling but fictional film, Hustle, focused on end-of-his-rope NBA scout who stumbles onto the next Luka Dončić (or Nikola Jokić?) while grinding his way through Spain, just added 57.2 million hours of streaming last week, according to Netflix, making it once again the platform's top movie for the week of June 13-19.
Granted, we're not talking about the kind of boffo numbers that have been put up recently by, say, Ryan Reynolds comedy-action titles Red Notice and The Adam Project.
But Sandler, whose Happy Madison production outfit signed an output deal with Netflix in 2014 and extended it in 2017, has a solid performer in Hustle. The film co-stars Queen Latifah and former NBA star turned TNT studio analyst Kenny "The Jet" Smith, along with a cavalcade of cameos from current-day and yesteryear NBA stars. The movie also led all Netflix films the previous week with 84.6 million streaming hours.
Hustle comes with a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which far outstrips the 52% rating received by Sandler's 2019 awards darling Uncut Gems, for what that's worth.
Meanwhile, the first volume of Season 4 episodes for Stranger Things continued to lead all four measured programming categories in Netflix's Global Top 10 last week, adding another 101.3 million viewing hours.
That was followed by Season 6 of Peaky Blinders, which exceeded 61 million viewing hours.
