Cost Of ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ Soars To $213 Million

‘How To Train Your Dragon’ cost more than $200 million.

Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures has revealed that it spent $212.7 million on its hit live action remake of computer animated children’s movie How To Train Your Dragon.

The live action version topped the box office in its opening weekend in June and went on to gross $636 million. Viewers were enamored by the saccharine-sweet story featuring many moments which are shot-for-shot remakes of the beloved 2010 original.

Across more than 10,000 verified ratings the remake earned an almost-perfect audience score of 97% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes despite critics only giving it 77%.

It stars teenager Mason Thames who got widespread acclaim for his part in Scott Derrickson’s 2021 horror film The Black Phone. In How to Train Your Dragon he plays Hiccup, a young Viking who shuns the family tradition of killing dragons when he befriends a cute winged creature called Toothless which was created by digital effects specialists Framestore.

Hiccup’s hirsute father Stoick the Vast is voiced by Gerard Butler in the animated films and he reprises the role in the live action version. He is joined by Nick Frost as the blacksmith Gobber the Belch while Hiccup’s classmate and love interest Astrid is played by child star Nico Parker, daughter of Mission: Impossible actress Thandiwe Newton. It didn’t come cheap.

The cost of movies made in the United States is usually a closely-guarded secret as studios combine them in their overall expenses and don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. It’s a different story in the United Kingdom where How To Train Your Dragon was filmed with the craggy hills of Northern Ireland doubling for the Vikings’ Scandinavian homeland of Berk.

Studios filming in the U.K. benefit from the government’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country provided that at least 10% of the movie’s core costs are incurred there. In order to demonstrate this to the authorities, studios set up separate companies to produce each film in the U.K. and they shine a spotlight on the costs of the movie. It takes some detective work to get to the bottom of it.

The companies have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing for permits to film on location. The Universal Pictures subsidiary behind How to Train Your Dragon is called Toothless Productions in a nod to its computer generated star.

As with all U.K. companies it files legally-binding financial statements which reveal everything from the production’s overall cost and level of reimbursement right down to the headcount, salaries and even the social security payments to staff.

The filings are released in stages long after the period they relate to. The process starts during pre-production and continues long after the premiere in order to give the production team time to ensure that all the bills are paid.

It explains why the company’s financial statements to December 31, 2024 were released on Monday and show that by then it had spent $212.7 million (£168.9 million) which was “in line with the budget plus approved overages.” This spending covered all of the filming which wrapped in May last year and relied heavily on the use of practical sets, hence the high cost.

One of the biggest single expenses shown in the filings was the $14.7 million (£11.7 million) spent on staff which peaked at a monthly average of 265 employees. That doesn’t even include freelancers, contractors and temporary workers. They aren’t listed as employees on the books of U.K. companies but often represent the majority of the crew on a film shoot.

The total cost isn’t expected to rise sharply in the next financial statements as only a few months of post-production were left after the date of the latest set of filings.

The reimbursement cast a powerful spell on the picture’s bottom line as Universal banked $32.6 million (£26 million) from the AVEC as well as a $1.2 million (£1 million) Northern Ireland Screen grant. This brought the studio’s net spending on the picture down to $178.9 million which is a sharp reduction but still considerably higher than estimated with Deadline claiming that it had “a $150M net production cost.” It was still a dream ticket for Universal.

The amount theaters pay to studios is known in the trade as a rental fee and an indication of the typical level comes from film industry consultant Stephen Follows who interviewed 1,235 film professionals in 2014 and concluded that, according to studios, theaters keep 49% of the takings on average.

This research lends weight to the widely-established 50-50 split which would give Universal $318 million from How To Train Your Dragon and a $139.1 million profit at the box office. It doesn’t stop there though.

The share of the box office isn’t a studio’s only return from a movie so offsetting it from the costs in the financial statements does not indicate whether it made a profit or a loss overall. The filings are only for the production company which made the movie so they don’t show the revenue from home entertainment and streaming sales or the highly-popular How To Train Your Dragon merchandise.

However, just as the production generates this additional income, it also incurs other costs, chief of which are the marketing expenses which are also not shown in the financial statements of the production companies. Accordingly, if the home entertainment and merchandise sales are added to the theater takings, the marketing cost should be deducted from them.

Universal doesn’t disclose how much it spends on marketing specific pictures or how much revenue each one of them generates from merchandise. Likewise, streaming sales are tough to attribute to specific productions as subscribers don’t pay per view.

It means that the picture’s overall bottom line is shrouded in uncertainty but there is little doubt that it was a success. That’s because two months before the movie had even been released, Universal announced that it was working on a live-action remake of the second film in the original animated trilogy. It is scheduled for release in June 2027 so we won’t have to wait long to tell whether it flies as high as its predecessor.