Animated streaming movies is a topic I love to bang on about. A lot. Why? Because it’s a unique content offering within the subset of kids entertainment which we see pop through consistently and convincingly in publicly available metrics. In other words, despite recent disparaging comments at The Oscars, these films are really freaking popular! That brings us to Amazon Prime Video’s Hotel Transylvania: Transformania.
While many think of the streaming wars as a battle for the buzziest new awards drama or star-studded blockbuster, the real SVOD clashes are fought in the trenches of regular daily usage. That’s where animated kids movies truly shine. Weekly ratings Top 10s coming from US Nielsen Streaming Ratings showed some interesting nuggets on the potential success/failure of Hotel Transylvania: Transformania which suggests some takeaways about Prime Video as a whole.
The Sony Pictures Animation flick was snapped up by Amazon Prime for a reported $100m. From the outside, this could have been seen as a slight snub to Netflix, which had enjoyed a great run of success with Sony animated films COVID-ed from theatrical to streaming in 2021 (Hell hath no fury like a dominant streamer scorned). The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Wish Dragon, and Vivo all did decent business for Netflix. The streamer also held the license for Hotel Transylvania 3 in a number of markets globally, which, per Netflix Global Top 10, seemed to draft off some of the associated Transformania marketing.
According to Nielsen, Transformania came in strong for Prime Video. Its first week hit higher than any of Netflix’s 2021 Sony kids acquisitions with 823m minutes viewed. Transformania’s initial success even raises the question of whether Sony’s animated titles perhaps underperformed for Netflix. They are, after all, the highest penetrated platform in the U.S. I guess you’d excuse anyone for coming up short to Disney/Pixar belters hitting Disney+, but Amazon Prime is not the same go-to destination for this kind of fare.
Alas, the rest of the story was not so positive as Hotel Transylvania 4 crashed out hard after its strong opening. The film bottomed out after just three weeks, much to my bitter disappointment. The overall curve is a bit different to what we typically see for direct-to-streaming animated films, where there’s a tendency for strong uptick in Week 2. Transformania reads as more of a weekend event: families and fans jumped straight on, but casual viewers didn’t necessarily accumulate (it generated just 13.1m hours over Week 2-3). Netflix had a longer tail for all of its Sony Pictures Animation features.
In streaming, it can be difficult to track the nuance behind various performance curves (which is why I’m attempting to help!). Back in the days of linear television, you could simply point to slot time and competition. Discovery opportunities on the Amazon Prime platform could have been more limited? I don’t know about you, but I find the interface mish with a capital MASH. With electronic sell-through (EST) jumbled in too, the ask to spend more money, when you’re already spending money to subscribe, is a big consumer turnoff. Tracking these factors on streaming is very difficult.
As touched on, releases from both Netflix and Amazon Prime pale when compared to the behemoth success enjoyed on the animated film front by Disney+. Soul, Raya and the Last Dragon, and Luca all did amazingly well. Encanto is currently redefining what it means to excel as a streaming kids title, likely held up by its addictive soundtrack. Disney’s last COVID-related hot wire from theatrical to Disney+, Turning Red, had the highest premiere week to date. Its 1,701m minutes viewed beat out previous Pixar leaders Soul (1,669m) and Luca (1,573m). Expect to hear more about that from me in the coming weeks. Pixar’s Lightyear is scheduled to get the full-scale theatrical treatment in June, and it will be fascinating to see how Disney (the market leader in kids animation) evolves its own animated feature distribution going forward.
As for Amazon, the studio has a history of whipping out the cheque book for high profile movies. During COVID, it set acquisition records with Borat 2 ($80m) and Coming to America ($125m). Maybe Transformania was another string to this bow. Or perhaps Amazon executives felt, tonally at least, it was an opportunity to explore what they might expect from The Addams Family animated IP, an inheritance of the MGM deal. From what we’ve seen on Netflix and Disney+, animated kids films can be work horses for day to day platform engagement. Amazon would do well to figure out how they can leverage a bit of this special sauce.