‘How To Train Your Dragon’ Just Set A Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score Record

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%

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.

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