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APEX Hollywood Shortlist: Hotel Transylvania 2 Trick or Treats Its Way to a New September Record with an Estimated $47.5M!

September 28, 2015  | Written by Tomas Romero

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APEX Insight: Hotel Transylvania 2 takes the top spot as monsters, interns and blood-thirsty cannibals gobble up the weekend box office!

Halloween came early for Sony’s Hotel Transylvania 2 which scared its way into the Hollywood record books with a howlingly-good $47.5M in ticket sales over the weekend, the largest September opening ever. Topping its predecessor, and previous September record holder, 2012’s Hotel Transylvania by an estimated $5M, the spirited sequel was directed once again by animation icon Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory).

And though this return visit to the “five stake” hotel run by Adam Sandler’s Dracula featured the voice talents of original co-stars Selena Gomez, Andy Samberg, Kevin James and Steve Buscemi, this time around the cast was joined by the likes of scary-good comediennes like Dana Carvey, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman and Mel Brooks. So, expect to see this pre-Halloween hit haunting the multiplex near you straight through to November.

Also opening wide was the Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway workplace comedy The Intern which took in a cc-worthy $18.2M. Directed by Oscar-nominated writer-director Nancy Meyer, who has been creating Pinterest-worthy dream homes and enviable workplace environments onscreen since before the Internet was even invented – anyone who remembers that sprawling Vermont farmhouse Diane Keaton semi-retired to in Baby Boom or Meryl Streep’s kitchen in It’s Complicated will know what I’m talking about – Intern also stars Renee Russo, Andrew Rannells and Pitch Perfect’s Adam DeVine. Already proving to be a massive word-of-mouth hit with Meyers’s older-skewing, mostly female demographic, this is one Intern that will most definitely get the job done in the weeks to come.

And though it took a while to get to theaters after making a splashy midnight movie premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, Eli Roth’s blood-soaked cannibal epic, The Green Inferno, opened with $3.4M over the weekend as well. Inspired by the insanely-gory Italian cannibal movies of the late-1970s and early 1980s, Roth says he was particularly influenced by 1980s Cannibal Holocaust and Umberto Lenzi’s grindhouse classic Cannibal Ferox. And if those titles alone don’t have you quaking in your hiking boots, just try sitting through Inferno’s Red Band trailer online. I assure you, you will never think of the the Guns N’ Roses anthem Welcome to the Jungle in the same way again. Yikes!

Weekend Box Office Estimates: Septemeber 25 – 27, 2015