In the taxonomy of movie monsters I keep in the back of my mind, the best dragons ever put on film are Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer, Maleficent at the end of Sleeping Beauty, and the dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. There are others that I like quite a bit, including the Hungarian Horntail from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and the lead beastie in Reign of Fire. We'll leave aside the notion that Godzilla is a dragon for the nonce. Most dragons these days trace their lineage to Vermithrax, who I think of as the Mother of Dragons even more than I think of Daenerys Targaryen in that role (Daenerys's dragons also trace their lineage to Vermithrax). Into this mix comes Smaug, the villain from The Hobbit who sits on a mountain of gold in his chambers beneath the Lonely Mountain. In The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), the second installment of Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation, Smaug takes center stage as Moriarty to Bilbo's Holmes.
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