10 Best Dragons In Film & TV
1. Smaug - The Hobbit
The Hobbit movies may have been slightly disappointing when compared to The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, but in Smaug they still have the screen’s best dragon.
Voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch and motion captured by the veteran actor too, Smaug is a truly fearsome foe.
A lot of the dragons here go against the grain of our expectations of the beasts, but the top two absolutely nail what everyone associates with the monsters. Reinventing ideas is fine, but both Drogon and Smaug are dragons at their intimidating best.
Much of the second movie, The Desolation Of Smaug, is set in Smaug’s gold pit, trying to avoid the dragon’s clutches. Like the early appearances of a more mighty Drogon or Shrek’s Dragon, Smaug is a huge, lurking presence here, never fully seen but always potentially in the shadows, waiting to strike.
The dragon is freed at the end of the movie, and wreacs havoc in The Battle Of The Five Armies.
You could argue he slips into just being a generic destroyer, but that sort of almighty power fits in perfectly with Mordor’s universe. We get enough of Smaug’s nature in the second film that we know all we need to understand him in the third.