How animated ‘Hotel Transylvania 3’ keeps Adam Sandler’s boxoffice relevance alive
ADAM Sandler in the flesh hasn’t been a significant boxoffice force on American 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 SNL 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 US$44.1 million in its domestic debut to win the weekend, according to box office estimates Sunday -- easily outdistancing past box-office champ ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ (US$28.8 million) and Dwayne Johnson’s underperforming new ‘Skyscraper’ (US$25.5 million).
The third ‘Hotel Transylvania’ film, co-starring the voices of Selena Gomez and Andy Samberg -- and co-written by ‘Boss Baby’ veteran Michael McCullers -- has already grossed US$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 US$473.2 million that ‘Hotel Transylvania 2’ grossed globally. For comparison’s sake, the second film had a US$48.5 million domestic opening in the fall of 2015.
Launched in 2012, Sony Animation’s ‘Hotel Transylvania’ franchise should soon cross the US$1 billion mark -- now sitting at US$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 (featuring such SNL-alumni voices as Ben Stiller and Chris Rock) has grossed.
But for Sandler -- who was in Noah Baumbach’s indie film ‘The Meyerowitz Stories’ last year -the last big non-animated movie was 2015’s CG-heavy ‘Pixels’. And his last film to top $100 million in North America was 2013’s ‘Grown Ups 2’ (US$133.7 million domestic, US$247 million worldwide).
Sandler, whose shingle Happy Madison Productions first signed a four-film agreement with Netflix in 2014, last year agreed to a new four-picture deal with the streaming service. As Variety reported, his four new features will be released “exclusively in homes.” — WPBloomberg