Adam Sandler and Netflix have had a productive partnership over the past few years. 2025 saw them enter the Oscar race together with the release of Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly, one of Sandler’s rare, more dramatic, yet still humorous roles opposite George Clooney. Before that, they had back-to-back big successes with the animated musical Leo and the long-awaited follow-up to his landmark golf comedy, Happy Gilmore 2, which the streamer went all-out to promote into a genuine event. Just two months ago in May, they came together to once again bring back one of the star’s beloved franchises with Grown-Ups 3, but before then, Sandler is stepping back into a production role to give his daughter Sunny Sandler the spotlight in a heartfelt dramedy of her own.
In less than one month, the younger Sandler will take the lead in the coming-of-age film Don’t Say Good Luck at the streamer, playing a teenager who’s ready to take center stage herself. Sophie Birenbaum has earned the lead role in her high school musical, which should be a big moment in her young life. However, the dramatic theatrics are soon overshadowed by the drama in her own home. Her mom, played by Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey, learns her cancer has returned, and Sophie struggles to process it in the middle of finding her voice on-stage.
Ahead of its release, Netflix shared the official trailer today, teasing a story that promises the same heart and humor of a Sandler production with a touching family story. The footage begins not with Sophie’s mom, but with Steve Buscemi, who’s playing her supportive grandfather, letting her ride home with a boy from school after they’re done reading lines. She’s taking the production very seriously, constantly practicing her acting and her moves with friends both at school and after hours, with her mom right there assuring her she’ll be great. There’s an awkward but sweet dynamic within the family, as Sophie’s mother can’t even bring herself to say «break a leg» out of fear her daughter will actually snap a bone on-stage, but their worries become far more serious when Sophie gets a fateful call from her parents. Learning her mother is once again very sick is hard for her to stomach, even as she celebrates her leading role. These two pivotal moments pull her life between joy, tragedy, and nervousness as both Sophie and her mom try to find the best in a bad situation.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Who Else Is Involved in ‘Don’t Say Good Luck’?
Disney’s Stargirl and Hollywood Stargirl director Julia Hart took the reins for Don’t Say Good Luck and also co-wrote the script with her husband, creative partner, and La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz. The story, however, came from Laura Hankin, who joined them in writing. Hart has a stacked cast bringing it to life, too, with Sandler and the Emmy-nominated Lynskey also joined by Max Greenfield, Jack Champion, Stephanie Beatriz, Scarlett Estevez, Jon Lovitz, Emma McNulty, and Bebe Neuwirth. This will be a big chance for Sandler to steal the show after her last starring turn in a Netflix team-up with her dad, the acclaimed comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, was an entire Sandler family affair, featuring not just Adam Sandler, but also Sunny’s sister, Sadie Sandler, and mother, Jackie Sandler.
Don’t Say Good Luck debuts on Netflix on August 14. Check out the trailer in the player above.
