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You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Kim Hollis: Hotel Transylvania, Sony's animated film featuring the voices of Adam Sandler, Selena Gomez and Andy Samberg, set the record for biggest September opening ever this weekend, earning $42.5 million. What do you think about this debut?

Jason Barney: I am not a real fan of the "biggest ever" opening labels, as those are inflation adjusted dollars, but still, this opening is very significant. $43 million is a pretty huge opening for any film, and considering that the last couple of weekends have been so putrid for the box office, this is great for everyone involved. As Hotel Transylvania moves forward, its ratings may hurt it a little bit, but as mentioned in the Weekend Wrap-Up, this is the first big film for kids since Ice Age and that was a while ago. It may not be a great film, but it filled a need at the right time, and the result was embraced by movie goers. Everyone involved should be happy, as this is great news. $42 million, #1 at the box office...there is not any bad news.

Tim Briody: It astounded me that Sweet Home Alabama held the September opening record for exactly 10 years, and that nothing had even topped $40 million in the month at all even as openings have gotten larger and we've gotten away from the notion that films can only open big at specific times. (The longest running monthly record is now February thanks to Passion of the Christ, a record I'm pretty confident will never be broken.) This is an extremely strong opening and shows what happens when you go two months without something aimed directly at the kids/families demographic.

Edwin Davies: I too was surprised to see that Sweet Home Alabama held that record, both because of how long it held it, and because who remembers that film anyway? Anyway, this is a pretty strong result for the film, Sandler, who's coming off two mediocre-to-awful results (though this isn't an "Adam Sandler film" in the way that That's My Boy or Jack and Jill were) and the box office in general. It's a massive improvement on the last few weeks, and even made more than all three of last week's openers combined. It'll probably hold fairly well in the coming weeks, too, since even though it's going up against Frankenweenie next week, that film will probably have a much smaller audience owing to its more overt darkness and the fact that people seem to be getting a bit tired of Tim Burton these days. All in all, I think this is a pretty strong result with hardly any downside.

Matthew Huntley: I expected Hotel to open around $30 million, similar to Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs from 2009, so this result is impressive no matter how you look at it. On the other hand, I'm not entirely surprised, because audience anticipation was high and kids/families are already in Halloween mode (some stores started selling Halloween decorations/costumes/candy as early as late August!). Plus, and maybe this is just me amongst us BOP analysts, but the movie had a very catchy trailer. I remember it debuted with Brave back in June and it was cut in such a way that made it seem fresh, funny and entertaining. If I was a kid, I would have been eagerly awaiting this movie to open and begging mom and dad to take me once it had. In any event, this has helped the industry as a whole, and since Sony has already confirmed a Cloudy sequel, I've little doubt a Hotel sequel may also already be in the works.

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