How to Train Your Dragon
This article was published on 6/14 and republished on 6/16.
The live-action adaptation of How to Train Your Dragon may have looked like an exercise in redundancy, given how 1:1 it seemed to the original, but it’s a massive box office hit due to the fact that audiences absolutely love it. And they love it to a point where it appears to be record-setting.
As it stands, How to Train Your Dragon has a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s up from the 77% critic score for the remake and even the 91% audience score from the original movie. That score? It’s a record among the slew of recent live-action animation adaptations, which are from Disney, not Dreamworks. Here’s the list:
- How to Train Your Dragon – 98%
- Aladdin – 94%
- Lilo and Stitch – 93%
- The Little Mermaid – 93%
- Mufasa: The Lion King – 89%
- The Lion King – 88%
- The Jungle Book – 86%
- Beauty and the Beast – 80%
- Cinderella – 78%
- Snow White – 71%
- Maleficent – 70%
- Mulan – 46%
How to Train Your Dragon
You will note here that How to Train Your Dragon is the only non-Disney film on this list, and it’s the first one Dreamworks has done. There are no other confirmed live-action adaptations that Dreamworks has announced but after this? It seems more than possible that they’re going to get working on…something, whatever that may be. Live-action Shrek? Anything’s possible. I was about to say Despicable Me, but that’s Illumination and Universal.
How to Train Your Dragon also got an “A” audience score from recent screenings, very solid in the context of that measurement. Generally speaking, these live-action adaptations have been more well-received by audiences than perhaps sometimes-jaded critics who are not amused with seeing these 10–30-year-old movies recycled into box office churn. But for many families, it’s a way to show these classics in an updated format to their kids for the first time or to get a hit of nostalgia for themselves. I can’t say I’m wild about most of these, but I thought Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin were really well done. I do want to see How to Train Your Dragon now, but my son isn’t quite old enough for that, and I don’t particularly want to head to a theater on my own to check that one out.
We will keep an eye on the box office for How to Train Your Dragon, which looks like it’s going to be enormous. And what announcements may follow, like adapting the movie’s sequel, no doubt.
Update (6/16): With 150% more audience reviews in, How to Train Your Dragon has maintained that 98% audience score, but we also now have figures in from the weekend in terms of its box office performance. And it was huge.
How to Train Your Dragon made a stunning $197 million worldwide in its opening weekend, with a $83 million haul domestically. That’s the highest for the series (the animated versions) and it has already reportedly passed its $165 million budget.
That’s already approaching the global total of the also-successful Lilo and Stitch like-action movie, which has made $274 million since its release a short while ago. But again, we can keep in mind that this is the first live-action adaptation offering from Dreamworks while Disney is up to a dozen plus now. It is very likely that the other two films in the How to Train Your Dragon series will now have planned adaptations as well, but there’s no official news on that quite yet.
This trend of adapation old animated features may be annoying to some older viewers of those original films, but more often than not it’s working out. The misses are rare (Snow White) but the hits? When they hit, they are huge, and this pattern is not going to end any time soon, like it or not. Next up on the agenda is Moana at Disney.
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