The 2018 Summer Movie season kept rolling right along this weekend as the Sony animated feature Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation cruised to the top of the North America box office. The news wasn’t as good for the Dwayne Johnson Die Hard wannabe Skyscraper, which found itself on shaky ground in third place.
While it appears that the live-action film career of Adam Sandler has been banished to Netflix –thank God for small favors-, his animated efforts such as the Hotel Transylvania series are still making their way to movie screens worldwide. This is hardly surprising since the first two efforts scored a huge $832 million in combined ticket sales. That total should zip right past the one billion dollar milestone thanks to the latest chapter in the series, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.
Hotel Transylvania 3 sunk its fangs into 4,267 theaters this weekend where it wound up with a healthy $44.1 million. With the $1.2 million earned by the June 30thAmazon previews added to the mix, HT3 debuted with $45.3 million. With or without the preview numbers factored in, the opening was the second biggest of series to date, just slightly below the $48 million banked by the second Hotel Transylvania in 2015. The PG-rated cartoon got off to a fast start internationally as well, where it has cleared $54.8 million.
Reviews were okay for Summer Vacation, certainly better than ones normally reserved for a live-action Sandler film. HT3 scored a 60% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, a 54/100 on Metacritic and an “A-“ from ticket buyers on CinemaScore. With kids out of school and rival cartoon Incredibles 2 beginning to wind down its theatrical run, the road ahead should be a good one for the $80 million Sony production.
Last week’s number one flick Ant-Man and the Wasp found itself feeling smaller this weekend as the latest Disney/Marvel flick dropped a steep 62% in its second weekend on 4,206 screens. Ant-Man and the Wasp buzzed an estimated $29 million in second place, bringing the domestic total up to an okay $132 million.
In comparison, the 2015 original dropped 56.5% in its sophomore session before leveling out for a solid run throughout the remainder of that summer. Should the new film do the same, it could close with approximately $200 million in domestic sales. While that number seems ant-sized in comparison to those scored by recent Marvel hits Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War, it certainly isn’t one that is going to have the Mouse House crying poverty anytime soon. After all, we’re not talking about Solo here.
Internationally, Ant-Man and the Wasp scored $35 million this weekend which helped push its foreign total up to $150 million.
Landing in third place with a loud thud was the latest action offering from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the Universal flick Skyscraper with an estimated $25 million from 3,782 theaters. The $125 million Die Hard clone was slammed by critics -51% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 52/100 on Metacritic- and not particularly embraced by the public, either. They gave the third film from Johnson in less than eight months a so-so “B+” on CinemaScore. Overseas, Skyscraper fought its way to an estimated $40.4 million.
Disney’s Incredibles 2 continued to put up a fight in fourth place with a weekend haul of $16.2 million from 3,705 theaters. Down 43%, the domestic total for the animated superhero sequel stands at $536 million. Incredibles 2 passed The Dark Knight this weekend to become the ninth highest-grossing domestic film of all time (pre-inflation). I2 scored another $50 million from overseas markets to bring its foreign total up to $321 million.
Rounding out the top five was Universal’s dinosaur sequel Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with an estimated $15.5million from 3,695 screens. Down 46%, the fifth chapter in the Jurassic Park franchise has bagged $363 million domestically and $771 million internationally.
- The First Purge (Universal) $9.1 million (-47.5%); $49.5 million
- Sorry To Bother You (Annapurna) $4.3 million; $5.3 million
- Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sony) $3.8 million (-49%); $43.2 million
- Uncle Drew (Lionsgate/Summit) $3.2 million (-51%); $36.7 million
- Ocean’s 8 (Warner) $2.9 million (-43%); $132 million
Next weekend sees the arrival of the action sequel The Equalizer 2 and the horror sequels Unfriended 2 and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
