Netflix confirmed during its annual Upfront presentation in New York City on Wednesday May 13, 2026 that Grown Ups 3 is officially in development, ending more than a decade of rumors, teases and fan demands with the first formal acknowledgment that the threequel is real.
Adam Sandler is returning. Tim Herlihy is co-writing the script. Kyle Newacheck, the director who made Happy Gilmore 2 one of Netflix’s biggest streaming releases of 2025, is directing.
The core five cast members from the original films are expected back. The last Grown Ups movie came out in 2013. It has been 13 years.
Netflix did not officially confirm the returning cast in its announcement. But Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter and multiple other outlets confirmed what the rumor mill has been reporting for years, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, David Spade and Rob Schneider are all set to return for the threequel.
No release date has been announced.
Sandler Coming Off Success Of Happy Gilmore 2
The specific version of the announcement matters because Grown Ups 3 has been not-happening for so long that it had become one of those sequel ideas that fans assumed was just never going to materialize. David Spade teased it.
Kevin James told fans they could “keep hope alive.” Adam Sandler said last year that “the idea is alive” without committing to when. For a franchise that last put out a film 13 years ago, that is a lot of hope to keep alive.
What changed was Happy Gilmore 2. Netflix released the sequel to the 1996 Adam Sandler comedy in July 2025, and the response validated the entire concept of legacy sequels for the streamer’s Sandler partnership. It was one of Netflix’s biggest releases of the year.
When Tim Herlihy, who wrote both Happy Gilmore films and both original Grown Ups films, was asked after Happy Gilmore 2’s success whether more sequels were coming, he said:
“This throws it open. The response to this and the way people have embraced it definitely makes it more exciting, if we were to do that.”
That was the summer of 2025. Nine months later, Netflix announced Grown Ups 3 at its upfront.
What Will Grown Ups 3 Be About?
While Netflix did not release a formal plot synopsis, multiple outlets reporting on the project have described a story that brings the five childhood friends back together through the death of a close friend.
Lenny (Sandler), Marcus (Spade), Rob (Schneider), Kurt (Rock) and Eric (James) travel to Europe with their significant others to spread their deceased friend’s ashes, a premise that trades the original film’s July 4th summer vacation energy for something with more emotional resonance appropriate to a group of men now in their sixties.
The Europe setting gives the film a scope that neither of its predecessors had, both Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2 were set entirely in small-town New England, with the hometown familiarity and summer nostalgia providing the texture of the comedy.
A road trip through Europe with the original crew is a meaningfully different concept, and the combination of grief, friendship, middle age and presumably still-absurd humor suggests the creative team is trying to give the threequel a distinctive identity rather than simply reproducing what worked before.
The Director Who Did Happy Gilmore 2
Kyle Newacheck’s involvement in Grown Ups 3 is the creative appointment that most directly signals Netflix’s intentions for the film.
Newacheck directed Murder Mystery, the Sandler-Aniston Netflix comedy that was one of the streamer’s biggest early original films, and then directed Happy Gilmore 2, which broke streaming records last summer and demonstrated that Newacheck understood both Sandler’s comedic sensibility and the specific challenge of making a legacy sequel feel like something more than a nostalgia grab.
Dennis Dugan directed both Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2.
His absence from the threequel is notable but not surprising given that Newacheck is now clearly the preferred Sandler director within the Netflix relationship, and the Europe setting and grief-adjacent premise suggest the film is being positioned as a broader, more cinematic production than the original two.
Newacheck and Sandler working together on a project with this profile of expectation, 13 years of fan demand, one of the most beloved comedy ensembles of the 2010s, a Netflix platform that has already demonstrated what a Sandler legacy sequel can do for streaming numbers, is the specific combination that makes this announcement something beyond the routine “sequel confirmed” story.
The Franchise That Became Critic-Proof
The original Grown Ups was panned by critics when it came out in June 2010. It did not matter.
The film earned $271 million at the global box office, making it Adam Sandler’s highest-grossing live-action movie outside the animated Hotel Transylvania franchise.
Grown Ups 2 in 2013 was also panned, it won four Razzie Awards, and also did not matter. It earned $247 million worldwide.
What the critics who did not like these movies consistently missed was the specific audience they were speaking to. Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2 were not trying to be sophisticated comedies.
They were trying to be summer movies for families who wanted to see funny people they liked being funny together in settings that looked like a good time.
The comedy that emerges when you put Sandler, Rock, James, Spade and Schneider in a room together is not precise or ambitious, it is warm, chaotic, and frequently stupid in ways that specific audiences find genuinely funny.
The Netflix platform removes the critical pressure that theatrical releases carry. There is no opening weekend box office to defend.
There are no review embargo drops to weather. There is no Rotten Tomatoes score that can sink a weekend’s gross.
The Grown Ups franchise moving to Netflix is, in that sense, a perfect fit, a films-for-specific-audiences enterprise going to a platform that rewards exactly that.
Happy Gilmore 2 demonstrated the proof of concept. The response to the sequel was not a reversal of critical consensus on Adam Sandler’s Netflix output, it was an enormous audience finding something they wanted that was exactly what it promised to be.
Grown Ups 3 is the same bet, scaled up to one of the most nostalgia-laden comedy franchises of the 2010s.
The Cast
The five men at the center of the franchise are now in their fifties and sixties. Adam Sandler is 59. Chris Rock is 61. Kevin James is 51. David Spade is 62. Rob Schneider is 62.
The characters they played in Grown Ups were middle-aged men reckoning with nostalgia and the distance between their youthful ambitions and their adult lives.
Grown Ups 3 will feature the same actors playing those same characters with 13 more years of actual life between them and the last time they inhabited those roles.
There is something specific about a comedy franchise that waits long enough between films that the gap itself becomes part of the story.
The characters are older. The actors are visibly older. The things the comedy can be about, what it means to be in your sixties, what friendship looks like when the shared history is now longer than the shared future, are different things than the franchise was dealing with in 2010 or 2013.
The death-of-a-friend premise is the signal that the writers understand this. You do not set up a Grown Ups threequel around someone dying if you are not aware that the comedy can coexist with something heavier now.
Sandler and Herlihy wrote Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and the original Grown Ups. They have also gotten older. The movie they write in 2026 about these characters will necessarily be informed by who they are now.
The Adam Sandler Netflix Decade
When Adam Sandler signed his first deal with Netflix in 2015, it seemed to many Hollywood observers like a retreat, a major comedian taking his talents to a streaming platform because the theatrical market had cooled on him.
The partnership has produced something more interesting than that narrative suggested.
Netflix gave Sandler the freedom to make exactly the movies he wanted to make for exactly the audiences who wanted to see them, without the anxiety of box office performance defining the conversation around each release.
The partnership has now been renewed multiple times and spans more than 10 films, Leo, Murder Mystery, Murder Mystery 2, Hubie Halloween, Hubie Halloween, Sandy Wexler, The Week Of, Just Go With It, Spaceman, Happy Gilmore 2 and the recently released Roommates among them.
Grown Ups 3 is the next chapter of that partnership and arguably the most anticipated project the arrangement has produced.
The announcement came at Netflix’s upfront, the annual presentation to advertisers and press where the streamer previews its coming year of content. Putting Grown Ups 3 in the upfront suggests Netflix views it as one of its marquee programming announcements for the coming year, not a quiet development deal that might never materialize.
The film is happening. The gang is coming back. It has been 13 years. They are going to Europe.
