There be Dragons in That There Box Office

Two weeks ago (at the time of this writing) we had the release of How to Train Your Dragon, the live-action remake (although considering how much CGI is involved in the film, calling it truly live-action is a bit of a misnomer) of the 2010 animated film How to Train Your Dragon. Its release was met with a bit of fanfare and, by all accounts, the film is doing reasonably well in theaters. It has so far made $371 Mil against a production budget of $150 Mil, making it a qualified success, and considering it probably has another month to go before it gets booted from theaters, it’ll likely turn a tidy profit for production studio Dreamworks Animation.

To be clear, I haven’t seen the film. I liked the original version well enough, and I thought the two sequels were cute, but I’m not a major Dragon head (or whatever the fans of the films call themselves). My wife loves How to Train Your Dragon, and its sequels, so she saw the remake opening weekend (I’m still trying to convince her to write a review so I don’t have to). She said it was great, and even while it was a shot-for-shot remake of the original, it was still nice to revisit the original story in a slightly different way. Which, I’m sure, is exactly the vibe Dreamworks was going for. “Here’s the film you saw, with new actors and a slightly different presentation. Relive it all again!”

And, in fairness, that’s a tack that Disney has taken for years and it’s led to some of their most successful films of recent memory. I found the 2019 The Lion King remake to be a vapid and empty experiment in making the exact same film all over again, just in a slightly different medium, and yet most people flocked to theaters to watch the film because they remembers watching the original as a child and they wanted to see it again and get their own kids to watch it two. Considering that How to Train Your Dragon, the original film, is 15 years old, Dreamworks is taking Disney’s playbook and running it just as well.

I was actually inspired to discuss this whole genre of animation-to-live-action films because of another Disney remake that has also become a big hit: Lilo and Stitch. By all the reviews I’ve seen (because, like with How to Train Your Dragon, I haven’t seen this remake) it’s another vapid and empty rehashing of a Disney animated classic that’s only a few years old, and yet because adults remember seeing it as a kid, they flocked to the film to watch the adventure all over again. 2025’s Lilo and Stitch made nearly $1 Bil at the Box office against a modest $100 Mil budget, meaning Disney was just printing money on that film. It’s no wonder they’ve already greenlit a sequel.

On the one hand I can’t blame these studios for making these films. While many of the remakes have flopped (The Little Mermaid, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Peter Pan and Wendy) there have been just enough successes to keep the money train flowing. Considering what has succeeded (Beauty and the Beast) and what has failed (Lady and the Tramp) it’s pretty clear that there is a winning formula to this. You can’t just remake any film, it has to be a beloved, successful film released just recently enough to get adults in seats alongside their kids.

Take Beauty and the Beast. The original Disney version came out in 1991, 26 years before its remake in 2017. That’s just the right amount of time for an adult to have a teen they want to see the movie with so they both can enjoy something from the adult’s past together. It was successful, gobbling up $1.266 Bil during its run. Compare that to The Little Mermaid, the remake for which came out in 2023. The original film dates back to 1989, which is 34 years. Not only is that film older, it had a wider gap between original and remake releases. While it still had a decent Box office run, $569.6 Mil during its release, when you compare that to its $240.2 Mil budget it’s likely the film lost a good chunk of money for Disney. They probably expected it to be another Billion dollar smash, and it wasn’t.

Now, sure, you can blame some of that on the “controversy” surrounding the film, with Disney casting a black lady, Halle Bailey, in the lead role of Ariel. Some might not have liked the fact that the live action actress didn’t look like the original character without specifically being racist about it. Some were probably racist about it as well, and they stayed away, too. I haven’t seen the film so I can’t judge it on its actual merits, but considering other empty and hollow animated remakes have made a Bil without breaking a sweat, at least some of the issues with the film’s run can be chalked up to age, if nothing else. And the same can be said for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a remake for a film that’s almost ninety years old. There is a limit to what people want to see for nostalgia sake, and ninety years has got to be far outside that boundary.

And of course, there is the occasional remake that does well despite it being for an older film. The prime example is the film that started this whole live-action remake craze: Maleficent. That film, a remake of the Disney 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty, came out to rave reviews and pulled in three-quarters of a Bil at the Box Office. But it’s also a weird outlier because while so many other remakes have stuck to the traditional story of the animated films, sometimes adding in subplots and new scenes but otherwise being a very true remake, Maleficent went a different direction. It’s a story told from the perspective of the original film’s villain, and it even changes the ending of the film to suit the new story. It works because it does something different, and audiences appreciated the audacity of it all.

So it’s not that the format doesn’t work, it just has limits to it. You either have to do something new with the base material or you have to find a film just in that sweet spot of old enough such that people are wanting to see a new version but not so old that it’s aged out of the nostalgia built around the film. You don’t see people demanding a remake of, say, The Rescuers, but if Disney were to turn around and make a new version of, say, Hercules or Pocahontas, it could very well be successful.

Maybe, or maybe not. The outlier here, of course, is Mulan, which is a terrible remake that everyone seems to hate, and it ended up being a massive bomb for Disney, only making $69.9 Mil against a $200 Mil budget. Although it’s hard to say how much of that was the fault of the film and how much was because Disney released it at the height of COVID when no one was going to theaters. Probably a bit of both. We can find outliers for any situation, for sure, but generally speaking nostalgia is the winning formula for these movies and Mulan just came at the wrong time.

With many of these films being successful, the production companies are wanting to do sequels, but this could be tricky. We’ve already seen a couple of live-action remake sequels come along and they were nowhere near as successful as their parent films. Maleficent might have made three-quarters of a Bil, but its sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil couldn’t even get across the $500 Mil mark despite a similar budget. Mufasa: The Lion King pulled in three-quarters of a Bil, which is big, but when you compare that to the 2019 The Lion King, which made $1.657 Bil during its run, it makes the prequel seem like a huge disappointment (and not just because it’s a terrible film).

While on paper sequels make sense, it does seem like the studios would be wise to hedge their bets. Disney’s Lilo and Stitch sequel has only just been announced as “in development”, but no concrete plan for it is yet in place, making it seem like the live-action version will likely go a different direction for the direct-to-video sequels and spin-offs the animated film received. I would hazard that How to Train Your Dragon’s sequel will find an easier time of it since that is planned as a remake of the second animated film, which, too, has a built in fanbase and nostalgia for it. But still, there’s no guarantee that a sequel to a massive theatrical success will see the same level of fan adoration, especially in the remake market.

In the end, none of this changes the simple fact that while many of these films can be financially successful, very few of them are artistically viable. For all the money thrown at them, all the CGI used to remake these worlds, they are very often shot-for-shot recreations trying to give people a version of the film they’ve already seen before. And when nostalgia isn’t a factor, audiences seem to realize they’re being played. It would certainly be nice if they could realize that even for more recent successes but, sadly, we haven’t gotten there just yet.