How To Train Your Dragon (2025) marks the most recent in the trend of live action remakes of beloved animated films. While it is the first non-Disney example of the trend in recent memory, with the recent success of Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon (2025)’s opening weekend besting industry expectations, it is a trend that is certainly here to stay.

Live action remakes of animated titles have had a rocky history of performance and reception, with some like Pinocchio (2022) and this year’s Snow White receiving less favourable audience reviews, while others like The Lion King (2019) and the still-screening Lilo & Stitch saw enormous success.

Given How To Train Your Dragon (2025) has been touted as a shot-for-shot remake in many sections of the movie, we wanted to see how the audience matches up for the live-action remake against others of its ilk, and against the previous instalment of the animated series, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

Family friendly with an adult appeal

The previous animated How To Train Your Dragon instalment, The Hidden World, debuted in 2019, and predictably as a family-friendly animated fantasy, it saw a very young audience, with more than a quarter of the audience being aged 2-11, compared to the average audience seeing only 9.1% in this age group.

How To Train Your Dragon (2025) saw a similar spike in attendance of moviegoers aged 2-11 during its opening weekend at 18%, but in an interesting divergence, the live action remake saw even larger spikes in moviegoers aged 25-34 and 35-44, at 19.8% and 22.8% of the audience respectively.

This could be partly due to the aging fanbase of the original films, given the first How To Train Your Dragon hit theatres fifteen years ago, as well as the family film parent-factor, but it also brings into question whether the live-action element entices a wider age range than the animation format.

In fact, this age profile lines up far more closely with the recent Lilo & Stitch live-action remake, with both titles seeing the same three age groups outperforming compared to the benchmark across all titles.

Diverging elements offer opportunity for cross-promotion

Where How To Train Your Dragon (2025) and Lilo & Stitch differ is in their audience frequency. While How To Train Your Dragon (2025) saw an outperformance in Infrequent moviegoers at 36.5% of the audience, it also over-indexed with Very Frequent moviegoers at 6.6% compared to the benchmark of 3.5%.

Similarly both films outperformed among groups, with groups of 3 or more tickets accounting for 45.9% of the audience for How To Train Your Dragon (2025) and 55.5% for Lilo & Stitch, but How To Train Your Dragon (2025) saw a much higher rate of single ticket purchases than Lilo & Stitch. This could align both with the higher Very Frequent moviegoer attendance and with the long-term fan element of the How To Train Your Dragon franchise.

With both films still in cinemas, movie marketers have the opportunity to use effective cross-promotion of these highly similar audiences to maximise their potential attendance during their theatrical runs. Promoting How To Train Your Dragon (2025) to those Infrequent moviegoers who came out for Lilo & Stitch and have not attended both titles could promote a return visit, boosting How To Train Your Dragon (2025) while encouraging repeat behaviour in that key moviegoing demographic.

Likewise the 25-34 audience showed great interest in both titles, particularly Lilo & Stitch. Combining the nostalgia element for this audience (who would have been in their teens when the original How To Train Your Dragon hit the big screen) with the extremely strong audience reception could encourage even more of this demographic to come out in the coming weeks.

Audience reception has shown to have a big impact on the live action remake trend consistently; Snow White’s less favourable reviews coincided with decisions to delay other live action remakes, and word-of-mouth has certainly helped Lilo & Stitch rapidly approach the $1B mark for the worldwide box office. How To Train Your Dragon (2025) has an extremely favourable audience and critical reception thus far, and leaning into it could be a real boon for movie marketers in the coming weeks.

*Frequency is based on a moviegoer's six-month session count:

< 2 = Infrequent
2-5 = Occasional
6-25 = Frequent
26+ = Very Frequent

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