Grandma's Boy
A 36-year-old video-game tester gets evicted and moves in with his grandma and her roommates, where he's surrounded by pajama-wearing grandmothers, a dealer named Dante with a pet chimp, and the crushing weight of being a grown man living with his grandma. Critics absolutely eviscerated it. Then the DVD turned it into a canonical stoner comedy.
Grandma's Boy was released on January 6, 2006, as a Happy Madison Productions film—produced by Adam Sandler and Allen Covert, with Sandler's house sensibility all over it. The film was directed by Nicholaus Goossen in his feature-film directorial debut, with a screenplay by Barry Wernick, Allen Covert, and Nick Swardson. Covert stars as Alex, a 36-year-old video-game tester who gets evicted from his apartment. With nowhere else to go, Alex moves in with his grandmother Lilly (Doris Roberts) and her roommates Grace and Bea (Shirley Jones and Shirley Knight).
The premise is built entirely on the absurdist collision between Alex's lifestyle and the domesticity of his grandmother's house. Around him orbit Jeff (Nick Swardson), a perpetual man-child, and J.P. (Joel David Moore), the pretentious game designer with an inexplicable robot voice; the studio is testing "Eternal Death Slayer III" while Alex secretly builds his own game, "Demonik." Into this mix comes Dante (Peter Dante), a dealer with a pet chimpanzee who pushes every scene toward chaos.
The film arrived to almost uniformly poor critical reviews—Rotten Tomatoes 15%, Metacritic 33—and seemed destined for immediate obscurity. Its theatrical box-office run was weak, grossing only $6.6 million worldwide on a $5 million budget. But something unexpected happened: the film found its audience on DVD and cable television. Dorm rooms and late-night college viewings turned it into a canonical stoner comedy, and its quotability—the absurdist non-sequiturs, the pet chimp, the robot voice, the relationship between Alex and his grandmother—gave it a staying power that the critics completely missed.
That same year it won "Best Stoner Movie" at High Times' Stony Awards, an honor that cemented its position in the stoner-comedy canon. What had been dismissed as incompetent comedy became recognized as intentional absurdism—the kind of film that knew exactly what it was doing and refused to acknowledge the gap between critical expectation and the film's own logic. The DVD market proved that theatrical flops could have massive lives beyond the cinema, and Grandma's Boy is perhaps the most vivid example of a film that would have been forgotten entirely in the pre-DVD era but instead sold over $100 million in home video, becoming a cultural touchstone for an entire generation. It's a film that got better the longer audiences spent with it.
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