Long Range Forecast — June 13, 2025
How to Train Your Dragon | Universal
Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $80M – $100M
The beloved family series How to Train Your Dragon returns to theaters with a live action adaptation, directed by Dean DeBlois, director/co-director of all three films in the animated trilogy. (DeBlois also co-directed the animated Lilo & Stitch, the live-action remake of which is poised for a record-breaking Memorial Day opening weekend.) The franchise, which last hit the big screen with 2019’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, has kept going with a trio of animated TV shows and a handful of short films, plus several video games and “How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk,” a section of Universal’s Epic Universe theme park in Orlando, Florida that opened to the public just yesterday. A Super Bowl trailer helped kickstart the marketing campaign for the film, which opens a week ahead of Disney/Pixar’s Elio—a factor that should help its opening frame.
Plenty of animated classics have gotten live-action (or photorealistic animation) remakes in recent years, but they’ve all been from Disney, which makes How to Train Your Dragon something of an unknown quantity. Still, the original trilogy never saw a massive drop-off in terms of box office receipts, which—combined with the aforementioned non-film iterations of the franchise—bodes well for this live-action version. (See below: though the trilogy experienced diminishing returns domestically, higher international totals bring How to Train Your Dragon 2 to the top of the heap globally, with The Hidden World coming in second.)
| Release Date | Domestic Opening | Domestic Total | International Total | Global Total | |
| How to Train Your Dragon | 3/26/10 | $43.7M | $217.5M | $277.2M | $494.8M |
| How to Train Your Dragon 2 | 6/13/14 | $49.4M | $177M | $444.5M | $621.5M |
| How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World | 2/22/19 | $55M | $160.7M | $361M | $521.7M |
An opening weekend in the $80M – $100M range would put How to Train Your Dragon in the realm of animation-turned-live action films The Little Mermaid ($95.5M domestic opening, $298.1M domestic total) and Aladdin ($91.5M domestic opening, $355.5M domestic total), both from Disney. Another appropriate comp—like How to Train Your Dragon, a mix of live-action and CGI—might be the three Sonic the Hedgehog films, which have opened to $58.M ($148.9M domestic total), $72.1M ($190.8M domestic total), and $60.1M ($236.1M domestic total), respectively. Or there’s Universal’s animated Kung Fu Panda series, which has followed a similar release pattern to Dragon—film one in 2008 for Panda/2010 for Dragon, followed by two sequels apiece spread throughout the 2010s with a fourth film (a new animated installment for Panda, a live-action remake for Dragon) in the mid-2020s—and thus could be aiming to attract similar age groups. Kung Fu Panda 4 opened to $57.9M last March en route to a $193.5M domestic total; How to Train Your Dragon, not being entirely animated, might enjoy more cross-quadrant appeal.
Tracking Updates [as of May 23]
| 5/23 | Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | $60M – $70M (3-Day) $75M – $90M (4-Day) | Paramount |
| 5/23 | Friendship (Wide) | $3M – $5M | A24 |
| 5/23 | Lilo & Stitch | $160M – $185M (3-Day) $185M – $230M (4-Day) | Disney |
| 5/23 | The Last Rodeo | $3M – $5M | Angel Studios |
| 5/30 | Karate Kid: Legends | $28M – $38M | Sony / Columbia |
| 5/30 | Bring Her Back | $4M – $6M | A24 |
| 6/6 | From the World of John Wick: Ballerina | $35M – $45M | Lionsgate |
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