🏨 Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022) Review

“A franchise that overstayed its welcome.”


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Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎥 Trailers

The trailers promised one last gimmick: monsters turning into humans, humans turning into monsters. A role-reversal comedy with high stakes for Dracula, Jonathan, and the gang. But even in marketing, it looked flat — and when it finally arrived, it barely made a ripple.


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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Dracula, preparing to retire, plans to hand over the hotel to Mavis and Johnny. But his fear of Johnny’s reckless nature makes him panic. In a desperate move, Johnny convinces Van Helsing to use his “Monsterfication Ray” to transform him into a monster so he’ll finally fit in with the family.

Of course, chaos follows: the ray backfires, turning Dracula and his monster friends into humans, while Johnny becomes a dragon-like monster. To fix things, they must trek into the jungle to find a crystal that will reverse the spell — all while bickering, slapsticking, and stumbling through uninspired gags.


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🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Character Rundown

Dracula (Brian Hull): Adam Sandler did not return. Brian Hull does a decent imitation, but the absence of Sandler (and Kevin James as Frankenstein) is glaring.

Johnny (Andy Samberg): Still goofy, now in monster form, but his whole subplot feels stretched thin.

Mavis (Selena Gomez): Reduced to a background role, again, despite being the emotional core of the first two films.

Monster Crew: Frankenstein, Wayne, Murray, and Griffin — humanized, but all their humor boils down to “look, now they’re awkward humans!”

Van Helsing (Jim Gaffigan): Once again tinkering with wacky inventions, serving as the plot’s excuse for chaos.



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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow

The movie’s pacing is all over the place. The jungle road trip premise quickly becomes repetitive, with gags dragging far past their punchline. The first two films had energy and charm, but this feels like it’s running on autopilot.


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✅ Pros

The premise could have been fun if handled with more creativity.

A few visual gags with the “monsters-turned-human” idea work for a laugh.

Brian Hull does a surprisingly solid Dracula voice despite the shoes he had to fill.



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❌ Cons

Adam Sandler and Kevin James’ absence is a massive blow — the energy is gone.

The role-reversal gimmick overstays its welcome almost immediately.

Mavis, once a central character, is sidelined into irrelevance.

Weak script with little heart or originality.

The animation feels more generic compared to Tartakovsky’s first two films.

Franchise fatigue: by now, the magic is long gone.



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💭 Why It Went Under the Radar

Unlike the first three entries, Transformania didn’t even get a full theatrical release. Originally scheduled for theaters, it was sold to Amazon Prime Video in 2021 and released there in early 2022. Sony clearly had no confidence in the film — and honestly, audiences didn’t either. It was “content” more than cinema, quietly dumped to streaming without fanfare. By the time it came out, even fans of the franchise had largely moved on.


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⭐ Rating

2/10 — A limp finale that fizzles out the franchise. Without Sandler, without heart, and without creativity, this one just feels like a contractual obligation.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning ⚠️

🕵️ Extended Spoilers – Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022)

Dracula, worried Johnny will ruin the hotel if it’s passed down, lies about conditions for ownership. Hurt, Johnny seeks Van Helsing’s Monsterfication Ray and turns himself into a massive dragon-like monster. But the ray malfunctions, turning Dracula into a regular human — along with Frankenstein, Wayne, Murray, and Griffin.

The group journeys to South America to retrieve a special crystal that can reverse the transformation. Along the way, most of the humor boils down to the monsters adjusting to being human: Wayne enjoying freedom from his wolf pups, Griffin realizing he’s naked when he becomes visible, Murray struggling with his frail human body. None of these gags carry enough weight to last the runtime.

Meanwhile, Johnny, now an excitable monster, becomes harder to control. He eventually goes on a rampage, forcing Dracula to admit his selfishness. The crystal restores everyone to normal, Johnny is turned back into a human, and Dracula finally acknowledges him as part of the family.

The film closes with Dracula deciding not only to hand over the hotel but also to give Mavis and Johnny the freedom to make it their own. Unfortunately, the “happily ever after” lands flat because the journey feels like it was made by committee.