With Hotel Transylvania: Transformania just a couple months away, we’ve received our first peek at the movie on Monday and, as we’ve come to expect from the franchise, the fourth and final movie in the Sony Animation series looks to be a ton of fun. However, there will be a major change to the franchise. Adam Sandler has quietly stepped down from Dracula as he’s remained busy on other movie projects... but that’s not the only thing being shifted for Drac.
Adam Sandler’s voice role has been handed off to Brian Hull, who is a voice actor who recently lent his voice to Disney’s Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure and Puppy Star Christmas. In the trailer he doesn’t have a ton of lines, but from what we’ve heard it sounds quite close to Sandler’s performance. Along with the cast change, Drac will also look and act different than he has prior thanks to a pesky Monsterifciation Ray. CinemaBlend spoke to Hotel Transylvania: Transformania’s co-directors Derek Drymon and Jennifer Kluska about the upcoming animated film, and Kluska shared with us another way Drac will feel different in his return to the big screen. In her words:
The way that Drac moves is so specific. He has this beautiful, fluid shape that’s almost a cylinder with a head on it. It’s so simple and gorgeous that it's all very reflective of the character that’s very fluid and powerful. When you take all that power away from him and he becomes a human, the whole habitat changes the nature of the animation. So we purposely designed Drac in a way where he’s the total opposite of that. When he’s a human, he’s got these short shorts and he’s got knobby knees and elbows and he kind of becomes very awkward and we really leaned into the realism.
For the first time in the Hotel Transylvania series, Drac will lose his vampire sensibility and become human. It happens when his human son-in-law (played by Andy Samberg) decides that he wants to become a monster like the rest of the Drac Pack and his wife Mavis. He goes to Jim Gaffigan’s Van Helsing to do the deed, and in the process Drac gets in the crossfires of a malfunctioning ray and becomes a living, breathing Homo sapien. Check out the trailer below:
The Transformania trailer only gives us a small dose of what to expect from human Drac, but as the directors teased, the character will move and look much differently as a human. It will be fun to see the roles reversed as Johnny tries out being a monster and Drac contends with what being in a human body is really like. Maybe it’ll allow the two in-laws to gain some empathy with one another about what it’s like to be in each other’s shoes.
The movie will finalize the Hotel Transylvania storyline that began in 2012. Even though Adam Sandler will not be involved this time around, the movie has an all-star cast including Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, David Spade, Keegan-Michael Key, Kathryn Hahn, Fran Drescher and Steve Buscemi. Transformania hits theaters on July 23, part of a schedule that is filled with a ton of other exciting summer 2021 movies.
