'Hotel Transylvania' rocks Transylvania box office

• The movie was No. 1 at the box office in Romania
• The premiere cocktail reception was held at Transylvania's "Dracula's Castle"
• The film was translated into Romanian and Russian

You would think the people of Transylvania would get sick of the Dracula jokes.

But Transylvanians apparently love their Hotel Transylvania. The historic region in central Romania even helped boost the box office spirits of the goofy animated film -- it was the No. 1 movie at the Romanian box office last week.

The movie with Adam Sandler voicing an overprotective vampire parent to his daughter (voiced by Selena Gomez) trounced regional Romanian movie competitors and American fare such as Taken 2.

Hotel Transylvania took in $140,000. For this minor movie market, that's fang-tastic.

"Most of the people found the film very funny and appreciate it as being one of the best comedies of the year," Andrei Agudaru, project officer of the Romanian Film Promotion office writes via e-mail.

"This concept of Transylvania as (the) center of monsters/home of Dracula is getting a little bit old (but) people don't react at it as they used to," writes Agudaru.

The film, which has made more than $119 million in the U.S., was translated to both Romanian and Russian.

Director Genndy Tartakovsky even attended the Transylvania premiere of the film last week, meeting with the local celebrities who voiced the film into Romanian.

"It was great," Tartakovsky told USA TODAY upon returning. "They haven't had a lot of real Hollywood people come in. So they were stuck with me. It was their first big premiere."

In fact, the Hotel Transylvania premiere cocktail reception was at Transylvania's Bran Castle, commonly known as Dracula's Castle.

Tartakovsky says there is discussion of branding the historic locale Hotel Transylvania to increase tourist traffic. Further proof the local people don't mind the monster moniker.

"They don't think of themselves as a monster town the way the we think of Transylvania," says Tartakovsky. "But it was great. They were super excited for the movie."