Weekend projections: How to Train Your Dragon lands with excellent $83.7 million

June 15, 2025

How to Train Your Dragon will open with about $83.7 million this weekend, according to Universal’s Sunday-morning prediction. While a little short of our model’s Friday-lunchtime prediction of $89.4 million, that’s a great result, particularly given that it’s easily the best weekend ever for the franchise, topping Hidden World’s $55 million debut back in 2019.

Here are the official studio projections for the three-day weekend (click the image for a full chart of all films reporting so far):

Dragon has a rare “A” CinemaScore, and a stellar 98% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes, which will likely translate into excellent legs over the next few weeks. It will clock in with another $114 million internationally this weekend, giving it $197.8 million globally for the weekend, the fourth-biggest global opening of 2025.

Demographics for the movie break 58% female and 57% under 25, with 34% under 12 indicating a strong family presence in theaters this weekend. Universal reports that the audience is 49% Caucasian, 21% Hispanic, 9% African-American, 14% Asian, and 7% Native American and other.

Top international markets so far are Mexico, with $14 million, the UK & Ireland with $11.4 million, and China, at $11.2 million. The Chinese performance is particularly notable, as it had the biggest non-holiday Friday opening of the year for a Hollywood film, and a Saturday total that more than doubled Friday’s. While China isn’t the hot market it once was for Hollywood, these are welcome numbers.

Also posting great numbers this weekend is Materialists, with an expected $12 million. Again, that’s not quite as high as our model predicted on Friday, but it’s a very strong result for a romantic comedy these days—the third-best in the past five years, in fact, after Ticket to Paradise ($16.5 million in October 2022), and No Hard Feelings ($15 million in June 2023). Word of mouth is key for these movies, so we’ll be looking at the day-to-day performance of this one over closely.

Finally, The Life of Chuck made it into the top 10 with a okay $2.1 million from 1,072. That’s quite a bit higher than the model predicted based on its opening weekend in limited release, but it’s well below the $4 million or so that we expected a couple of weeks ago. Neon must be disappointed with this result, which is low enough (at $2,000 per theater) to forestall any additional expansion, and most likely means it won’t have enough momentum for word-of-mouth to help it appreciably.

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com

Filed under: How to Train Your Dragon