After slowly expanding overseas starting back in early January, Universal/Comcast unleashed How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World into domestic theaters to sky-high results. The well-reviewed trilogy capper opened with a whopping $55.5 million over the Fri-Sun weekend. That's not even including $2.5m in Fandango sneak previews from a few weeks back, which puts the domestic cume at $58.028m. Inflation notwithstanding, that's the second-biggest animated debut ever for the month of February behind only The LEGO Movie ($69m in 2014).
It's bigger, even adjusted for inflation, then the $43 million launch (in 2010) and the $49m opening weekend (in 2014) of the first two How to Train Your Dragon movies. Considering The LEGO Movie 2 just opened with half of what the original movie nabbed (and is on track to barely cross $100m domestic) and Kung Fu Panda 3 opened with just $41m in late January of 2016 (compared to a $60m launch for Kung Fu Panda in 2008 and a $48m Fri-Sun launch for Kung Fu Panda 2 in 2011), that How to Train Your Dragon 3 ended up with a franchise-high opening is unquestionably impressive. That it did so with 118 episodes of various How to Train Your Dragon TV shows airing from 2012 to 2018, all available on Netflix, along with the standard "fewer people go to the movies just to go to the movies" variable, is borderline miraculous.
In more milestones of note, it's (again, sans inflation) it's the biggest Fri-Sun launch for a DWA title since Madagascar: Europe's Most Wanted ($60 million) in 2012. The first Universal-released DreamWorks toon (Comcast bought the Jeffrey Katzenberg's company in early 2016) scored a bigger opening weekend (even adjusted for inflation) than any of the Fox-released DWA toons. That's no shade on Fox, as they had their share of DWA hits (The Boss Baby and Home both snagged $50m-plus opening weekends and The Croods earned $583m worldwide in 2013). However, it is an encouraging sign that DWA is still a brand to be reckoned with even as it becomes a cog in the Comcast machine.
That's doubly important considering that DreamWorks is now part of the same company that also owns Illumination, which arguably supplanted DWA's title as Disney's chief animated competitor. In retrospect, Despicable Me ($543 million worldwide on a $69m budget) trouncing Megamind ($321m on a $130m budget) in 2010 turned out to be a highly symbolic showdown of sorts, as did the fact that Despicable Me became the first non-Shrek and non-Pixar/Disney toon to top $250m domestic right alongside Toy Story 3's $415m-grossing domestic run. There may have been room for two animated powerhouses, but not three.
How that changes now that Po and the Minions are under the same roof I can only guess. I'd like to think that Comcast will encourage DWA to let their fantasy flag fly, both in terms of dramatic adventure stories like How to Train Your Dragon and acid-trip comedies like The Boss Baby while Illumination maintains its current trend of comparatively grounded, human-scale animated comedies. Or all of this could just mean that How to Train Your Dragon (which, as a franchise, went from Paramount in 2010 to Fox in 2014 to Univeral in 2019) is just a much-loved animated series and that Universal successfully sold the hell out of the whole "end of the story = end of an era" hook.
Like Logan, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II and, haha, Avengers: Infinity War, Universal and DreamWorks aggressively pushed the notion that this was the final chapter in a long-running saga and emphasized the franchise-specific nostalgia. It helps that many of the folks who were teens when the first film came out are now the young-and-hip 20-somethings now manning (or womaning) the entertainment media sites and/or possibly just old enough to take their first born to a weekend matinee.
This geezer was days away from turning 30 when the first How to Train Your Dragon came out. It was contrasted with an oddly mournful viewing of Waking Sleeping Beauty (which chronicled Jeffrey Katzenberg's 1980s revitalization of Disney Animation and indirectly morphs into a DreamWorks origin story) where I welled up realizing that I was old enough for news that I vividly remembered following on a day-to-day basis to now be old enough to be worthy of a "way back when" documentary.
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (which should have won DWA that year's Best Animated Feature Oscar) slightly underperformed in North America ($177 million domestic but $620m worldwide), but the fanbase and the general audiences showed up for the third go-around. Like Kung Fu Panda 2 (another "underperforming" sequel that blew past $600m worldwide), the darker second installment gave way to a comparatively less heartbreaking third chapter. To be fair, that's par for the course with most trilogies (Return of the Jedi is less grim than Empire Strikes Back), and it'll probably matter in the long run that How to Train Your Dragon 3 is more likely to make adults cry than kids, as opposed to the second Kung Fu Panda (which contained a panda genocide and some really moving emotional beats) and the second How to Train Your Dragon (which had a brutal second-act plot turn).
HTTYD3 is a better film than KFP3, even if both are comparative comedowns from their first two installments (HTTYD2 and KFP2 are DWA's best movies). But the third movie, which earned an A from Cinemascore, followed the Pixar template (make the kids laugh and make the parents cry) this time. With soaring trailers (cleverly using a cover of "Learning to Fly") that played with the likes of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Incredibles 2 (and racked up 212 million online views) and the usual NBC/Universal/Comcast cross-promotions, the marketing got series finale bump for a threequel that could have easily fallen victim to the "its time has passed" factor.
It gives hope that maybe The LEGO Movie 2 didn't stumble specifically because of the five-year gap (Godzilla: King of the Monsters is breathing a sigh of relief), and it's the second time in two weeks that a big newbie has vastly overperformed compared to the pre-release tracking. After the last month, where the pre-release tracking for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Aquaman and Glass were pretty much dead-on, it's nice to have an optimistic surprise here and there. It's also nice to see that the studio can move the needle upward beyond what the three-weeks-out projection predicts, so that's good news for Captain Marvel.
Counting its overseas bounty (it's expected to open with around $30 million in China next weekend), the $129m-budgeted DWA toon has earned $217m overseas for a promising (including the sneak previews) $275m worldwide cume. Speaking domestically, DreamWorks Animation movies are known for their ridiculous legs in nearly every occasion. Out of the 36 DWA films between 1998 (Antz) and 2017 (Captain Underpants), 28 of them have opened on a standard Fri-Sun weekend. 26 out of 28 such releases have earned at least 3.2x their debut weekend.
The outliers are Captain Underpants (which inexplicably underperformed with $73 million from a $24m debut weekend right alongside Wonder Woman) and Shrek the Third. That 2007 release earned a then-record $121m debut weekend (biggest ever for animation until Finding Dory) and a $322 million domestic multiplier for a mere 2.65x multiplier amid the likes of Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Unless something goes askew, $180m domestic may be the floor for Dean DeBlois' well-liked and family-friendly toon. If it can withstand the next MCU movie, then How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World could soar to... say it with me now, infinity and beyond.
The only other new wide release was MGM's expansion of Fighting With My Family. The well-reviewed biopic of WWE breakout star Saraya "Paige" Bevis (played by Florence Pugh) played in four theaters last weekend and expanded to 2,711 theaters yesterday. Sadly, the Stephen Merchant-directed dramedy (which is pretty darn good and arguably a "better biopic" than Bohemian Rhapsody) earned just $8 million over the weekend (a mediocre $2,955k per-theater-average) for an $8.277m ten-day total.
The movie only cost $11 million, so here's hoping that it sticks around and maybe legs it to $24m domestic. Again, it's pretty darn good (it's a better biopic than both Vice and Bohemian Rhapsody) and deserves your time and money if you have both to spare. As always, vote with your wallet.
