WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Season 1 of Drifting Dragons, now streaming on Netflix.
Rob Bowman's 2002 post-apocalyptic thriller Reign of Fire, while not the best-received popcorn film, did impress audiences with its depiction of dragons as vicious hunters driving mankind to the brink of extinction. Set in England in 2020, it focused on Christian Bale's Quinn trying to protect his people and an American hotshot, Denton (Matthew McConaughey), using an international coalition of soldiers to strike back.
While it ended on a victorious note for humanity, plans for a sequel never materialized, which is what the movie was clearly angling for in its conclusion. However, the never-to-be-seen follow-up could exists in Netflix's Drifting Dragons.
In Reign of Fire, mankind drilled too far into the Earth and dragons rose up to eliminate the species. It's revealed they were responsible for ending dinosaurs and they hibernate until the planet's populated enough again to raze. The film ends with Denton and most of his soldiers dying, but Quinn finishing the job by killing the lone male dragon. This means the female dragons won't be able to spawn new babies and three months later, with no dragons heard of, it's clear the armies have indeed succeeded in taking down the rest of the beasts or, at least, pushed them back into hiding.
The point is, in this film, mankind is the predator again, the alpha hunters, with dragons being the prey. This is the starting point for Drifting Dragons, in which dragons can't hide on land; instead, taking to the sky and to mountains because they believe the clouds can cover them. As a result, the kill has evolved into an industry, a business where war vessels like the Quin Zaza use Denton-like soldiers to hunt the dragons down. They sell them for meat, their hides, fat and dragon oil, which are used for pharmaceuticals or fuel. This trade creates competition with other vessels. In fact, towns are now ports because the money to be made is exponential.
It's exactly how Reign of Fire could have continued as an anime. In the film, when Quinn puts up radio receivers, the resistance notes they're winning. He even passes the baton off to his stepson, Jared, so in a possible sequel, we might have seen humanity rebuilding using the very creatures that destroyed them. Livestock, fuel and so many things people took for granted were gone, and so seeing a hunting industry and dragons becoming a new currency, with mankind as the aggressor, would have been an interesting way to progress things.
Audiences are so accustomed to it being the other way around, which Drifting Dragons capitalizes on by flipping the script. Like Reign of Fire's hunters, there isn't sympathy for the beasts either: when Mika and Co. kill them, they carve them down on the spot and deal them to buyers.
Reign of Fire also had politics, with the Americans and British not agreeing on the hunt, and we see this in Drifting Dragons. Different nations, hunters, ships and ports follow different rules and ideals, plus, there are pirates attacking airships for their haul. This alone sells itself as what could have happened in the wake of Quinn's victory in Reign of Fire, with humans getting their ego, arrogance and selfish ways back across the globe.
Even more intriguing is that this doesn't diminish the monsters that dragons are or allows us to sympathize with them. It simply makes the hunt a means of revenge, which just to happens to generate income. Most of all, at their core, both properties follow the same principle -- wherein humans believe war is the key to progress, evolution and prosperity.