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Hotel Transylvania 3 tops charts at US box office

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A scene from "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation." (AP)
A scene from "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation." (AP)

Los Angeles — 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 on Sunday that the animated family movie earned $44.1m from North American theatres. As the first in the franchise to open in the summer, it's just slightly under the previous instalment’s $48.5m debut in September 2015.

Worldwide, Hotel Transylvania 3, which releases in SA in August - has already earned more than $100m.

"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 $900m 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 $25.5m domestically. Skyscraper cost a reported $125m to produce, not accounting for marketing costs.

Johnson has been a consistent presence in movie theatres this year with both Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Rampage prior to Skyscraper. Both previous films opened in the $35m range, and while Jumanji went on to be a worldwide box office juggernaut, Rampage petered out domestically just under $100m. 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 $40.4m from 57 territories for a global total of $65.9m.

Second place went to Disney and Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp, which brought in an additional $28.8m 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 $16.2m and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom rounded out the top five with $15.5m.

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 $4.3m 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 theatre average of the year, with $252 284 from four theatres. 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 Neighbour? which added $1.9m from 868 theatres, and Three Identical Strangers which expanded to 167 theatres and grossed $1.2m.

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