Blood money
Hotel Transylvania sequel keeps Sandler relevant
Adam Sandler in the flesh hasn’t been a significant box office force on U.S. screens for at least five years. Yet the warbling golden throat of Sandler the Voice Actor keeps him very much in the game.
That’s because, much like his former Saturday Night Live castmate Mike Myers, Sandler knows the power of keeping alive a commercially healthy animated franchise even while he works on projects for Netflix.
Sandler’s Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation grossed $44.1 million in its domestic debut to win the July 13-15 weekend, according to box office estimates — easily outdistancing past boxoffice champ Ant-Man and the Wasp ($28.8 million) and Dwayne Johnson’s underperforming new Skyscraper ($25.5 million, all figures in US dollars).
The third Hotel Transylvania film, co-starring the voices of Selena Gomez and Andy Samberg, has already grossed $100.2 million worldwide on an $80 million production budget.
A key benchmark now will be to see whether the new movie can match the $473.2 million that Hotel Transylvania 2 grossed globally. For comparison’s sake, the second film had a $48.5 million domestic opening in the fall of 2015.
Launched in 2012, Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania franchise should soon cross the $1 billion mark — now sitting at $931 million worldwide.
As animated powerhouses go, that’s nowhere near the $3.5 billion that Myers’s Shrek franchise grossed globally — or even the $2.26 billion that the Madagascar franchise has grossed.
But for Sandler, the last big nonanimated movie was 2015’s CGheavy Pixels. And his last film to top $100 million in North America was 2013’s Grown Ups 2 ($133.7 million domestic, $247 million worldwide).
Sandler, whose Happy Madison Productions first signed a four-film agreement with Netflix in 2014, last year agreed to a new fourpicture deal with the streaming service. As Variety reported, his four new features will be released “exclusively in homes.”
Sandler still has a couple of bigscreen crime comedies on his slate, but how long till he signs on for a fourth Hotel Transylvania film?