# Adam Sandler Is Filming All Over New Jersey. Again. 2026-09-08 · New Jersey · Culture Grown Ups 3 has moved through suburban streets, downtown business districts, restaurants and a Shore amusement park. The more interesting story is not that Hollywood showed up. It is that New Jersey increasingly knows what to do when it does. Grown Ups 3 has moved through suburban streets, downtown business districts, restaurants and a Shore amusement park. The more interesting story is not that Hollywood showed up. It is that New Jersey increasingly knows… --- There was a version of New Jersey movie culture in which a film crew arriving in town was an event all by itself. A truck appeared. A road closed. Somebody saw a famous person near a deli. A photograph moved through Facebook groups at roughly the speed of a brush fire. For a few days, the town became the town where the movie was filming. Netflix confirmed on August 6 that Grown Ups 3 had officially begun filming in New Jersey, bringing Sandler back together with Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider, along with Maya Rudolph, Maria Bello and Salma Hayek Pinault. Netflix’s published logline is short: now that the characters’ children are grown, the group is free to take an “ultimate adventure.” The company has not announced a release date. What Netflix did announce is almost less interesting than what happened next. The production began moving. Woodbridge. Morris Township. Madison. Ridgewood. Keansburg. Not one studio complex. Not one picturesque estate sealed off from ordinary life. A suburban street. A hotel restaurant. A borough road. A downtown business district. An amusement park and water park at the Shore. That map says something about New Jersey’s current place in the film business. The state is no longer simply trying to convince productions that it can host them. Increasingly, productions are using New Jersey the way New Jersey actually exists: as a dense collection of very different places close enough together to become one working backlot. The Confirmed Map Is Already a New Jersey Sampler It is worth being precise because active film productions generate rumor almost as efficiently as they generate call sheets. Netflix has confirmed the statewide fact of production but has not released a complete town-by-town location list. Some locations have instead been established through municipal officials, public road operations and on-record local reporting. In Madison, Borough Director of Operations Michael Pellessier confirmed that the August 6 closure of Green Village Road was tied directly to Grown Ups 3. The detail matters beyond traffic. Madison is a certified Film Ready New Jersey community, meaning the borough has already gone through state-backed training intended to make permitting, public safety and production coordination more predictable. Nearby, production activity was reported at Rod’s Steak & Seafood inside The Madison Hotel. The geographic distinction is easy to miss: despite the hotel’s name, the property is in Morris Township, not Madison Borough. That sounds like trivia until a production needs permits, police coordination or a road closure. Then municipal boundaries become the difference between the right phone call and the wrong one. On August 26, Ridgewood’s communications office confirmed filming on East Ridgewood Avenue in the village’s Central Business District. Village Manager Keith Kazmark put the municipality’s view plainly in a statement: Ridgewood’s charm and location have made it attractive to productions, and the village and police department work with producers to create a welcoming environment for cast and crew. That is not the language of a town surprised to discover a movie set in the street. It is the language of a town treating film production as an operational category. Then the production went to Keansburg. Mayor George Hoff confirmed in August that the Grown Ups 3 company was scheduled to film in the borough near the end of the month. By early September, Hoff said filming had been underway since August 27 and had remained concentrated largely around Keansburg Amusement Park. Sandler and Hayek were photographed working at the amusement park and Runaway Rapids water park. Woodbridge’s Colonia section was also part of the early production activity, with Sandler and Rock reported on location there as the New Jersey shoot began. Unlike the municipal statements above, a public township release naming the production has not surfaced, so the Woodbridge stop is best treated as a well-documented reported location rather than dressed up as something the township formally announced. That distinction is exactly what makes the story more interesting. The point is not to collect every Sandler sighting. The point is to see the system underneath them. This Is Not Sandler’s First New Jersey Lap Grown Ups 3 would be notable on its own. In context, it looks more like a continuation. Happy Gilmore 2, also directed by Kyle Newacheck, filmed for 64 days in New Jersey. According to the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission, the production recorded $152.5 million in qualified in-state spending, the highest qualified spend for a single production since the state reinstated its film tax credit program in 2018. The state said Happy Gilmore 2 filmed in 31 municipalities across nine counties. Its locations included golf courses, private homes, Newark Liberty International Airport, Fairleigh Dickinson University and other sites spread across the state. The production spent $1.2 million on lodging and $6.4 million hiring extras. Those numbers change the meaning of a celebrity sighting. The guy in basketball shorts getting coffee is the visible piece. The less visible part is hotel rooms, catering, background performers, police details, municipal staff, location managers, drivers, equipment vendors, restaurants that become sets and restaurants that feed the people working on those sets. The same NJEDA release made another point that now reads almost like foreshadowing: Happy Madison Productions had already chosen New Jersey again for another project, Don’t Say Good Luck. Grown Ups 3 extends the pattern further. At some point, repetition becomes a business relationship. The State Has Been Building for Exactly This New Jersey’s film push is not subtle anymore. In March 2026, the state added 15 municipalities to its Film Ready New Jersey program, bringing the total to 58 certified communities. The program is designed to create statewide consistency around the very things residents experience when a production arrives: permits, fees, police and fire coordination, road management, local contacts and the small-business opportunities that come with hosting a crew. The state’s own production numbers show why that local preparation matters. The New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission reported that 555 film and television projects worked in the state in 2024, accounting for 2,422 filming days and an estimated $834 million in total in-state spending. That represented a 41 percent increase from the previous year. The locations are only one half of the strategy. The other half is physical production infrastructure. Netflix is building its flagship East Coast production campus at the former Fort Monmouth property in Monmouth County. State documents describe a 292-acre campus with 12 soundstages and more than one million square feet of studio and support space. Netflix has described the investment at roughly $1 billion and expects the facility to become a major long-term production base. The irony is that Grown Ups 3 helps explain why the studio project matters by spending so much time outside a studio. Soundstages can provide controlled interiors. They cannot manufacture the specific feel of East Ridgewood Avenue, an established Shore amusement park, a suburban street or a hotel restaurant that already has decades of visual texture. A serious production state needs both: places where a world can be built from nothing and places where the world is already standing there. New Jersey’s Advantage Is That It Looks Like a Lot of Things Film officials have been making some version of this argument for years: New Jersey’s usefulness is its variety. The state can offer city blocks, beaches, farmland, mountains, industrial corridors, old houses, new subdivisions, college campuses, downtowns, diners, country clubs and shore towns without requiring a production to cross half a continent between them. In 2025, NJEDA Chief Executive Officer Tim Sullivan described that range as stretching from the Jersey Shore and Pine Barrens to cities and quiet suburban neighborhoods. Grown Ups 3 is a particularly clean demonstration because its public New Jersey footprint is so ordinary. Not ordinary in the sense of visually dull. Ordinary in the more useful sense: these are places where New Jerseyans already go. A business district is not a film set until trucks arrive. Keansburg Amusement Park does not need a production designer to invent its history. A restaurant already has the wear, lighting, layout and accumulated detail of a place that serves actual people. A residential street already knows how cars sit in driveways and where garbage cans go. That lived-in quality is difficult to fake precisely because nobody designed it all at once. It also happens to fit Sandler’s filmmaking world unusually well. His comedies are often built around friendship groups, families, sports, restaurants, schools, neighborhoods and public places where adults are given enough room to act like children again. Whatever Grown Ups 3 ultimately does with its New Jersey locations, Netflix has not disclosed scene-level details, the franchise has always depended less on fantasy geography than on recognizable social space. New Jersey has a lot of recognizable social space. The Celebrity Sighting Is Becoming the Least Important Part None of this means the sightings stop being fun. Adam Sandler appearing in Ridgewood or Keansburg is still Adam Sandler appearing in Ridgewood or Keansburg. People are going to take pictures. Kids are going to gather. Someone will tell the story later with increasing confidence that they were much closer to the camera than they actually were. That is part of the culture too. But the more useful shift is that New Jersey is beginning to experience filming as something other than a temporary invasion from Hollywood. The state is building studios. Towns are training for production logistics. Police departments know what the ask looks like. Local officials are talking about filming as an economic-development category. And repeat productions are moving through the same state without needing the entire state to stop and stare. Ridgewood’s statement may be the most revealing one in the entire Grown Ups 3 story. The village did not simply say a movie had been there. It said it wanted more. That is the difference between hosting a production and building an industry. When Grown Ups 3 eventually arrives on Netflix, New Jersey viewers will get the familiar side game: identifying streets, restaurants, storefronts and Shore landmarks before the movie has finished using them. “That’s Ridgewood.” “That’s Keansburg.” “I know that place.” The larger recognition may take a little longer. Hollywood did not simply come to New Jersey for this movie. It keeps coming back. SOURCE NOTES • Netflix Tudum — Grown Ups 3 cast, logline and confirmation of New Jersey filming • About Netflix — Netflix Upfront 2026 announcement of Grown Ups 3 • NJEDA — Happy Gilmore 2 Spends Record-Breaking $152M in NJ during Production • NJEDA — 2026 Film Ready New Jersey cohort; 58 communities certified • NJ Motion Picture & Television Commission — Film Ready New Jersey • NJ Motion Picture & Television Commission — 2024 Annual Report • NJEDA — Netflix Studio Project Approved for Aspire Tax Credits • NorthJersey.com / AOL — Ridgewood confirmation and Village Manager Keith Kazmark statement • Patch — Keansburg Mayor George Hoff’s on-record filming confirmation • NJ 101.5 — Madison Director of Operations Michael Pellessier’s confirmation of Green Village Road closure • Patch — documented Woodbridge/Colonia production activity --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.