Hotel Transylvania 2 arrived on September 25, 2015, with a tagline promising the gang was “back to raise a little terror.” What Sony Pictures Animation delivered is a sequel that raises almost nothing — not stakes, not laughs, not the pulse. Genndy Tartakovsky returns as director, Robert Smigel and Adam Sandler share the writing credit, and the cast files back in. The film grossed $474 million worldwide against an $80 million budget. Money is not the same thing as merit.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Dennis Has No Fangs
The premise picks up several years after the 2012 original. Mavis (Selena Gomez) and Johnny (Andy Samberg) have married and had a son, Dennis (Asher Blinkoff). Dennis is about to turn five and has not grown his fangs. Dracula (Sandler) fears the boy will never gain vampire powers. Mavis fears something else: that raising a child in Transylvania is dangerous, and that Johnny’s hometown of Santa Cruz, California, would give Dennis a “normal” childhood.
That disagreement is the engine of the film, and it is a thin one. Drac tells Johnny to take Mavis to California to visit his parents — Linda (Megan Mullally) and Mike (Nick Offerman) — while keeping her distracted and not too happy, so she will not want to move. Drac stays behind to “babysit” Dennis. He is convinced the boy is a “late fanger.”
Camp Winnepacaca Burns
Drac enlists his friends to force the transformation. Every attempt fails. So the group heads to Camp Winnepacaca, Dracula’s childhood summer camp, which he finds has been made much safer since his day. He hurls Dennis from a tall, unstable tower to pressure him into becoming a bat. Dennis does not transform. Drac flies down and catches him at the last second.
Then Frank (Kevin James) loosens the tower. It collapses onto the campfire, and the fire spreads to the tower and every building. The entire camp burns. It is the closest the film comes to a real idea — old-school monster parenting as actual negligence — and it is played for a shrug.
The returning voice cast:
- Adam Sandler as Dracula
- Selena Gomez as Mavis Dracula
- Andy Samberg as Johnny Loughran
- Kevin James as Frankenstein
- Steve Buscemi as Wayne
- David Spade as Griffin
- Keegan-Michael Key as Murray
- Fran Drescher as Eunice
- Molly Shannon as Wanda
- Mel Brooks as Vlad
Mel Brooks joins as Vlad, the old-old-old-fashioned vampire who arrives at the hotel for an impromptu family get-together. That is the collision the tagline sells: supernatural old-school against modern day cool. It is also the part of the movie with the least to do.
The Numbers
- Release date: September 25, 2015
- Runtime: 89 minutes
- Budget: $80 million
- Worldwide gross: $474 million
- Metacritic: 44/100
- Genres: Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy
- Award: Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Animated Movie
- Sequel: Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, 2018
A Franchise Running on Volume
Hotel Transylvania 2 is 89 minutes of noise arranged around a question nobody in the audience is asking. Will a five-year-old grow fangs? The film treats this as a crisis, then moves on. Drac’s scheme to keep Mavis unhappy so she stays put is the kind of plot that only works if every adult in the room is written as a fool.
The movie does land on an answer to its central argument. Mavis wants Dennis raised normal in California, and that is the direction the film takes. The conflict between her wish and Drac’s is settled, not left hanging.
The reviews were mixed, and the mixed verdict is too generous. A Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Animated Movie says more about who was voting than about what was made. The $474 million gross says the same about who was buying tickets. Neither figure tells you whether the movie is any good, and it is not.
What is worth noting is the pattern. The first film had a clean premise: a monster dad hiding his daughter from the human world. The second sets up a real disagreement, then spends its running time on slapstick instead of the argument it raised.
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation followed in 2018. The franchise kept going because the audience kept showing up, not because this installment earned it.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
