The movie doesn’t have to explicitly be about dragons, but dragons need to be featured as more than just a passing comment or minor cameo or scene.
I love the Eborsisk in Willow. It’s a very unique two-headed fire breathing dragon that is somehow both incredibly ugly and very cute, and Willow is one of my favorite films.
Rathalos from Monster Hunter and King Ghidorah from Godzilla are also very cool dragons.
I’m commenting here for the sole purpose of discouraging anyone from watching the Eragon movie. It’s so bad. Like, you know how the Avatar movie was widely considered the worst big screen adaptation? It pales in comparison to how inaccurate, and how poorly the Eragon movie portrayed the book. The actors actually did do a fair job, but the issues were well beyond anything that great acting could have fixed.
They missed and cut out far too many important plot points, so many that making sequels based on that movie would have been completely impossible unless they were willing to write an entirely new story from scratch
They failed to capture any significant character development
They excluded the vast majority of characters, and most of the ones that they missed went on to become integral parts of the series later on
They portrayed the movie as pg-13 at best, where central plot points and character development hooks happened SPECIFICALLY because of the brutality and bloodiness of the war that was raging
and…that’s just an overview. I have been a fan of these books since i was in like second grade, and at every single turn of the movie something was beyond wrong. They didn’t get any single thing right, other than MAYBE the visual portrayal of the Sword that Brom gave to Eragon, Zarok. (misery)
TL;DR: The movie is awful, don’t watch it. The books are absolutely delightful, and I highly recommend reading them. I’m also very much so looking forward to the adaptation that’s currently being made by Disney, with the author of the books working closely on the project and as a producer.