If you asked me to name Hollywood’s billion dollar franchises I can promise you that Hotel Transylvania would not even enter my mind. I, apparently, am dumb, as the Sony animated films have grossed $1.3 billion to date. What are you gonna do? The people love Adam Sandler.
Needless to say, the series has been incredibly successful for Sony Pictures Animation (who has curated quite the catalog of quality animated films) but the very real threat posed to, well…everything, by the Delta variant of COVID-19 has lead the studio to start entertaining deals to premier the final chapter of the series on a streaming service. Sony is one of the few majors to not have their own service and has bounced around quite a bit with the deals they’ve made with their features, selling major titles to HBOMax, Apple TV+, Netflix, and Hulu. Amazon seems to be their partner du jour as Cinderella is set to premier on Amazon Prime Video in September, and word is that they are nearing the close of a 9-figure deal on Hotel Transylvania: Transformania, which originally had an October 1st theater premier date. Seeing as how families are the least likely to brave a theater, especially with no vaccine being available for kids, I don’t see how they had another choice. Still, it’s got to be a hard decision not to delay the film until 2022. Yes, $100M is a ton of cash, but when the last installment in your series (Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation) took in over $500M worldwide you could see how it’s still a sacrifice. Granted, series stars Adam Sandler and Kevin James are not returning, but for a film like this it’s not like that has a big effect on the audience.
The rest of the cast, including Selena Gomez, Andy Samberg, David Spade, Steve Buscemi, Kathryn Hahn, Jim Gaffigan, Molly Shannon, Keegan-Michael Key and Fran Drescher are all still on board for the final film, so if the cast was the draw you should still be in good hands.
