You don’t envy the guy who has to make a sequel to Happy Gilmore. Thirty years after Adam Sandler beat Bob Barker to the ground with a hockey stick, here comes Kyle Newacheck, best known for Workaholics and Murder Mystery, suddenly carrying the weight of America’s collective jackass-quoting adolescence. “It’s like you’ve already built a fantastic building,” he told me. “Now go build another one right next to it.”
Newacheck knew the risk, but the script pulled him in. “This screenplay was great from jump,” he said. “You can’t improv a good story. You just cannot.” Which is saying something for a guy whose career was built on riffing. What hooked him wasn’t just the jokes but the “emotional investment without super sap.” The kind of thing that gets you to the end feeling weirdly uplifted, even if you’ve spent two hours watching Sandler scream at a golf ball.
The nostalgia question hung heavy. Do you chase the VHS fuzz of the ’90s or pretend it never happened? “We tried to take pieces from the first and plug them in in a more sleek way,” Newacheck said, noting the gap between dragging film cameras onto fairways in 1996 and casually sending a drone up in 2025. But the harder part wasn’t the tech, it was the comedy. “There’s not a ton of comedy-first movies right now,” he said. “Everything’s action-comedy or dark-comedy. This is a comedy-first movie. A family, fun, heartfelt comedy. Do they even make these anymore?”
But it’s still a golf movie, even if its director hadn’t touched a club since Happy Gilmore made him believe he could. “I learned most of what I know about golf on this movie from some of the best golfers in the world,” he admitted. “Happy Gilmore is a golf superhero. That’s the wish fulfillment.” He now owns a Happy Gilmore putter, which he swears will follow him the rest of his life. Scotty Scheffler even turns up for jokes—a cameo that got shot not long after his arrest just a few miles from this studio.
The cameos don’t stop. Dennis Dugan, who directed the original, shows up—this time in front of Newacheck’s camera. “I try to leave my ego aside and learn as much as I can,” he said. “Dennis was so loving and cool, willing to tell me all the stories. He’s sitting there talking about Saving Silverman and I’m like, ‘You directed that? That’s one of my favorites of all time.’”
Then there’s Bad Bunny, who Newacheck swears is about to be Hollywood’s next secret weapon. “First take, I lined it up and I was like, are you kidding me? I totally believe this guy. Is Bad Bunny that good? Bad Bunny is that good.”
For all the nostalgia and quotability, Newacheck insists the movie isn’t about reliving the past. It’s about building something that can still make you laugh out loud in a world where comedy is usually just a knowing nod and a “that’s funny.” “We used to have this form of comedic release,” he said. “We’d all get so annoyed hearing people quote Anchorman. But now? I want that again. I miss it.”
If Happy Gilmore 2 delivers on that—if people are back to shouting “jackass!” across golf courses—then Newacheck did the impossible: he built another building right next to the first one, and it didn’t collapse under its own nostalgia.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.