10 Years Ago Today, Netflix Released Its First Original Comedy Movie (And Everybody Hated It)

Over the last several years, Netflix has become known as a hub for original comedy films, as their direct-to-consumer approach has done a number on theatrical comedies (which we learned in 2025 definitely aren’t dead after all). Many of the new comedies released nowadays end up as originals on Netflix, but the company’s initial foray into the genre was actually a bit disastrous. Believe it or not, Netflix released its first comedy movie exactly 10 years ago, and just about everyone who saw it totally hated it.

On December 11, 2015, Netflix released The Ridiculous 6, a satirical Western from Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison production company. It marked Netflix’s foray into comedy, as well as the first film in a long-running partnership with Sandler, which many had hoped would be a home run. Instead, we got an infamously bad movie that a lot of fans put right next to Jack and Jill when thinking about Sandler’s worst films.

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Netflix has obviously released a bunch of other comedies in the years since — and some of them have actually been pretty good. But it’s still such a surprise now to look back and see how poorly things started.

If you’re curious as to just how bad The Ridiculous 6 is, it is perhaps best known for being one of the few major movie releases to earn an infamous 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It fared slightly better with fans — but not that much better, scoring a 37% on the viewer-driven Popcornmeter. The criticisms range from the sheer laziness of the projects attempts at humor, to calling out many of the offensive depictions contained within its characters.

The Ridiculous 6, from director Frank Coraci, is just about as bad a movie has we’ve seen on Netflix over the last decade (though I’d still take it over Spenser Confidential any day of the week). The movie stars Sandler as an outlaw in the old West named White Knife, who found himself without parents at a young age and was raised by Native Americans. He eventually discovers that he has five half-brothers and he bands them all together to try and track down their deadbeat father.

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The rest of the ensemble cast includes Terry Crews, Jorge Garcia, Taylor Lautner, Rob Schneider, Luke Wilson, Will Forte, Steve Zahn, Julia Jones, Harvey Keitel, Nick Nolte, Jon Lovitz, Whitney Cummings, David Spade, and Danny Trejo. There are also a couple of ridiculous guest appearances in the film, with Blake Shelton showing up to play Wyatt Earp and Vanilla Ice portraying Mark Twain.

It’s an absolutely stacked cast, which is par for the course in an Adam Sandler movie, but not one of them are able to live up to their talent with the material they were stuck with on this one.

The Ridiculous 6 is still available to stream any time on Netflix, though it’s doubtful many folks are opting to press play on that one 10 years later. Sandler’s partnership with Netflix has at least resulted in some better movies over the last decade.