Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation has left the Dwayne Johnson action thriller, Skyscraper, in the dust.
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation has checked into the No. 1 spot at the box office in its opening weekend and left the Dwayne Johnson action thriller, Skyscraper, in the dust.
Sony Pictures estimated Sunday that the animated family movie earned 44.1 million dollars from North American theaters. As the first in the franchise to open in the summer, it’s just slightly under the previous installment’s 48.5 million dollars debut in September 2015.
Worldwide, Hotel Transylvania 3 has already earned more than 100 million dollars. “It’s really terrific,” said Adrian Smith, Sony’s head of domestic distribution. “We’re positioned to take advantage of the valuable summer weekdays and there are six weeks of summer left.”
The successful series has grossed over 900 million dollars worldwide to date. Going into the weekend, experts expected a three-way race to the top between Hotel Transylvania 3, Skyscraper and Ant-Man and the Wasp, but the family film won by a large margin.
“There haven’t been a lot of options for families this summer,” said comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “They become instant hits.”
Johnson’s Skyscraper, a rare original summer blockbuster, remained earthbound in its first weekend in North America. The Universal Pictures film brought in only 25.5 million dollars domestically. Skyscraper cost a reported 125 million dollars to produce, not accounting for marketing costs.
Johnson has been a consistent presence in movie theaters this year with both Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Rampage prior to Skyscraper. Both previous films opened in the 35 million dollar range, and while Jumanji went on to be a worldwide box office juggernaut, Rampage petered out domestically just under 100 million dollars. As with Rampage, however, the studio is expecting the majority of Skyscraper profits to come from international audiences.
“Skyscraper is really engineered for a global release and it got a terrific start,” said Jim Orr, Universal’s president of domestic distribution. “We have great faith in a more than terrific run at the domestic box office going forward.”
Internationally, Skyscraper grossed 40.4 million dollars from 57 territories for a global total of 65.9 million dollars. Second place went to Disney and Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, which brought in an additional 28.8 million dollars in its second weekend, down 62 percent from last week. It’s one of the steeper second week falls in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first Ant-Man fell 53 percent.
Incredibles 2 took fourth place with 16.2 million dollars and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom rounded out the top five with 15.5 million dollars.
A handful of smaller releases made notable splashes this weekend including Annapurna’s buzzy dystopian satire Sorry to Bother You, which opened in limited release last week and added 789 locations this weekend. It earned 4.3 million dollars in its expansion for spot No. 7 on the charts.
The coming of age film Eighth Grade also scored top marks, and the highest per theater average of the year, with 252,284 dollars from four theaters. The well-reviewed pic will expand nationwide in the coming weeks.
And documentaries continue to perform well too, including the Fred Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? which added 1.9 million dollars from 868 theaters, and Three Identical Strangers which expanded to 167 theaters and grossed 1.2 million dollars.
Estimated ticket sales are for Friday through Sunday at US and Canadian theaters, according to comScore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.