Netflix released the official trailer for Roommates this morning, giving audiences their clearest look yet at the upcoming comedy from director Chandler Levack and Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions. The two-minute trailer arrives just weeks before the film’s confirmed global streaming debut on April 17, 2026, and sets up what promises to be one of the platform’s bigger comedy releases of the spring.
The film centres on Devon, a hopeful and somewhat naive college freshman played by Sadie Sandler, who makes what she believes is a socially savvy move by asking the effortlessly cool and confident Celeste, played by Chloe East, to share a dorm room with her. According to Netflix’s official logline, “a blossoming friendship spirals into a war of passive aggression,” and from what the trailer suggests, that spiral unfolds with escalating intensity across the length of a freshman year. The premise taps into something deeply familiar: the particular anxiety of college’s first weeks, when who you room with can feel like one of the most consequential decisions of your life.
Levack, the Canadian filmmaker who earned widespread critical praise for her 2022 debut feature I Like Movies, has spoken openly about what drew her to the material. In an interview with Collider, she described the film as “a really audacious, fun comedy that still feels really raw and authentic to the harrowing experience of trying to make friends in your first year of college.” She also cited working with Sadie Sandler as a specific creative motivation, calling her performance in You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah incredible, and described Adam Sandler as one of her chief comedic inspirations growing up. For Levack, Roommates represents a deliberate step toward larger-scale commercial comedy while retaining the emotional honesty that defined her earlier work.
The screenplay was written by Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara Jane O’Sullivan, the duo behind Saturday Night Live’s viral “Domingo” sketch, and the film carries a noticeable SNL fingerprint throughout its ensemble. Sarah Sherman, who plays a character named Dr. Schilling, brings her signature offbeat energy, while Martin Herlihy also appears in a supporting role. Beyond the SNL contingent, the cast expands into something genuinely impressive: Natasha Lyonne, Nick Kroll, Carol Kane, Janeane Garofalo, Storm Reid, Bailee Madison, Billy Bryk, Josh Segarra, Aidan Langford, Bella Murphy, Jaya Harper, and Ivy Wolk all appear in the film, making it one of the more densely stacked comedy ensembles Netflix has assembled in recent years.
Production took place in Jersey City, New Jersey, with principal photography running from June 24 through mid-August 2025. The Hudson County locations were dressed to serve as a fictional university campus, and early behind-the-scenes photographs released by Netflix show a production that leaned into the visual language of modern campus life. Director Levack has described the tone as an “honest investigation” of the first year of college, and noted that Charli XCX’s “girl, so confusing” served as a thematic touchstone during production, a reference point for the intoxicating and destabilising nature of female friendships in that particular phase of life.
Sadie Sandler, who was herself finishing her freshman year at NYU during the film’s pre-production, told Teen Vogue that the film’s central conflict resonates on a personal level. “If you don’t even know who you are yet, how can you have a stable relationship?” she said. That question sits at the heart of what Roommates appears to be doing: using the comedy of passive aggression and dormitory warfare to get at something true about the emotional volatility of becoming an adult while still entirely unsure of who that adult is going to be.
For Happy Madison Productions, Roommates marks the sixteenth film the studio has produced exclusively for Netflix, continuing a partnership that has generated consistent audience numbers across titles including Murder Mystery, Hubie Halloween, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, and most recently Happy Gilmore 2. Adam Sandler serves as a producer here alongside Allen Covert and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, though he does not appear on screen. The decision to hand the film’s creative reins to Levack, a filmmaker with a distinctly indie sensibility, suggests Happy Madison is willing to let Roommates occupy different territory than the broader Sandler-fronted comedies that have defined the partnership to date.
Roommates begins streaming globally on Netflix on April 17.
