In
Happy Gilmore,
Carl Weathers’ Chubbs Peterson was more than a mentor — he was the heart of the movie. A former golf pro with a wooden hand and eternal optimism, Chubbs helped shape Happy into the club-swinging chaos agent fans came to love. After
Happy Gilmore 2 was announced, fans had been hopeful for more Chubbs magic. But as
Adam Sandler recently revealed during an interview with Collider’s
Steve Weintraub, Weathers’ untimely death forced a major rewrite — and a painful creative decision.
“
We had a painful change. Carl Weathers had a massive part,” Sandler told Collider. “I would talk to Carl, and we were excited, and then Carl passed away. We had to rewrite a lot of the stuff, and even what the story was. We made a lot of nice references to how great Chubbs was in the movie. That was the biggest change.”
Chubbs’ presence, it turns out, was meant to be far more than symbolic. In early versions of the script, the beloved character would’ve appeared frequently — visiting Happy in dreams and even setting up a new emotional arc involving a family member.
“In the first version that we came up with, he had a son. He was coming back to me a lot in my dreams, and he had a son who was mad at Happy for causing the death of daddy.”
