The vampires and ghouls of Hotel Transylvania scared up record-setting box office on its opening weekend.
The animated family film grossed an estimated $43 million to place first for the weekend, ahead of Looper ($21.2 million), End of Watch ($8 million in its second week of release), Trouble with the Curve ($7.53 million, also in its second week) and House at the End of the Street ($7.15 million, in its second week, also).
Won’t Back Down, the other movie opening wide, did poorly at the box office, grossing only $2.7 million. The drama, starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, opened on 2,515 screens).
Hotel Transylvania not only had the best debut ever for a Sony Pictures Animation movie (other Sony animated movies include The Smurfs and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), but also it was Adam Sandler’s second highest debut, behind 2005′s The Longest Yard ($47.6 million).
Sandler provided the voice for Count Dracula in the movie. He is the owner of an exclusive resort frequented by monsters and where he shields his teenage daughter, Mavis, from the outside world (meaning humans). Things get topsy turvy when a backpacking human shows up, and he and Mavis fall in love.
Sandler’s recent movies have underperformed, leading to talk that his appeal had waned. The lesson here could be that bad material kept people away from those other movies. (Or the lesson could be that the key to getting people to attend an Adam Sandler movie is to hide him behind an animated cartoon character.)
