'How To Train Your Dragon', 'Lilo & Stitch' dominate box office

At the global box office, How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch are dominating with $200 and $850 million respectively.

Both films are PG-rated live-action remakes, showing a strong response for nostalgic remakes after four weekends of release.

According to Variety, the Universal & DreamWorks Animation has raked in $114 million internationally across 81 markets while on domestic, the movie earned $83 million, leading to a figure of $197.8 million so far on the budget of $150 million.

On the other hand, Disney sailed through at the global box office with over $850 million and marched toward 2025’s first billion-dollar movie.

Earlier, the How To Train Your Dragon director Dean DeBlois looked back at the design of the Toothless, which was different from the animated films.

“We went too far a couple of times in exploring where Toothless could have come from,” he told Discussing Film.

However, an expert's advice led the creative team to change the design of the dragon. “We received some advice from John Dykstra. He’s a legendary visual effects person from ILM, and he was consulting with Universal at the time."

"He said to think backwards, like if the animated movie is a stylized and exaggerated version of these creatures, then what did they look like in real life? It was a great philosophy to adopt as the designers at Framestore started to explore the other dragons,” the director added.

Dean also added they did not take creative liberty with Toothless, given how much fans liked the original version.

“We could depart from some of the cartoonish designs with the other dragons. But with Toothless, in particular, he’s so iconic and so expressive,” the filmmaker shared. 

“He’s already quite specific that as we tried to change his face and maybe make his mouth or eyes smaller, or shift proportions around, he stopped feeling like the character very quickly," the director added.

“So, we decided to retain the Stitch-like proportions of the eyes to the nose to the mouth, but then work on his body and make it feel convincing and realistic in terms of his skeleton, musculature, and iridescent scales. We really wanted to lean into his black panther animal reference,” Dean noted.