Hopefully this franchise about the undead can't be killed off!
You're watching Beyond The Trailer's review of Hotel Transylvania 2!
Fellow vampire Count von Count would say that Sony Animation has THREE franchises - or is
that one? The math is perhaps trickier than Sesame Street level. Sony Animation started
out with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, then added The Smurfs followed by Hotel Transylvania.
These three movies were big enough hits to suddenly make Sony Animation a genuine competitor
with Disney-Pixar, Dreamworks, Illumination Entertainment and the like. But then, well,
2013 was a bad year. Cloudy directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller had become live action
famous thanks to 21 Jump Street, leaving another duo to direct the Cloudy sequel. And while
Cloudy 2 performed on par with the first movie, Lord and Miller - GASP! - went over to Warner
Bros Animation for The Lego Movie which was a HUGE success! So it seems they won't be
able to return to Sony Animation even to exec produce a third movie like they did with Cloudy
2. Then also in 2013 The Smurfs 2 hit theaters, and only brought in half the box office of
the first smash hit. In fact that first movie brought in so much money Sony Animation isn't
willing to give up on the little guys, and are currently in the process of re-inventing
the franchise - a process that must be as tricky as catching a smurf, because the release
date keeps getting pushed back. Right now Get Smurfy is set for 2017. So that leaves
just Hotel Transylvania on solid footing - or is it? While the first Hotel Transylvania
was a big hit, it was released at just the BEGINNING of Adam Sandler's career implosion.
If the Drac Pack wants to really show young Dennis something truly terrifying, they should
let him take a gander on how the general public turned on Sandler's Pixels like a zombie going
after brains. Talk about torches and pitchforks, it would seem most moviegoers want Sandler's
career DEAD. Will he be able to hide behind animation, or will those moviegoers still
sniff him out? So, can Sandler - whose had a long relationship with Sony - at least still deliver
for their animation department, or does the studio need to have a Sandler exorcism?