Hotel Transylvania 4's Big Announcement Has Fans Seeing Red
The "Hotel Transylvania" franchise has gone in many directions over the years. The Adam Sandler vehicle features the classic "Saturday Night Live" player as a version of Count Dracula who owns a hotel for weary monsters to get away from the human world. From the beginning, the story was injected with the need for humans and monsters to reach at least some kind of accord when Dracula's kid Mavis (Selena Gomez) finds love with the very obnoxious human Jonathan (Andy Sandberg).
Since then, we've seen half-human/half-monster characters introduced and we've watched the whole gang take a breather from the hotel setting for a cruise-faring vacation. However, it's been over three years since "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation" and fans are nearly done waiting for the new film in the series.
We already knew from its trailer that the latest film, "Hotel Transylvania: Transformania," was flipping the script by turning the monsters into humans and the humans into monsters, but it turns out that's not the only way the film franchise is transforming — and not every fan is thrilled about it.
A horror comedy coming out in January is never a good sign
We're in the month of October right now. There are many holidays throughout the month worth celebrating, but most of us are already in the process of celebrating Halloween — be it by watching horror movies, decorating our homes with eyeball wreaths and skeletons, or just consuming a lot of candy in spite of our bodies begging us to stop.
You might think to yourself that October would be the ideal month for a franchise like "Hotel Transylvania" to debut its latest film, but we're still going to be waiting a little while longer. After an initial slated theatrical release of October 1, it was announced today on Twitter that not only is "Hotel Transylvania: Transformania not dropping until January 14, 2022, but it's also heading directly to Amazon Prime.
How do fans feel about the decision? "I don't understand, why," tweets @nakamura-kiku. "January, really!? I guess the movie is really bad." Their sentiment is certainly not the only one of frustration and disappointment.
"Hotel Transylvania has entered the 'shuffles onstage an hour late too coked up to play a single chord right, loyal fans depressed and outraged' phase of their success trajectory," tweets @GodotIsW8ing4U. And @WhitneyAndrean4 summed it up succinctly when they wrote, "too far."
Filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve are still decrying the simultaneous release of films in theaters and on streaming platforms and after Scarlett Johansson settled out of court over the streaming release of "Black Widow." It's hard not to see the latest "Hotel Transylvania" releasing straight to Amazon Prime as anything other than an admission that Sony simply isn't confident that a theatrical-only release is worthwhile.