It’s a good time to be Dean DeBlois. First, Disney makes a box office juggernaut live action remake of his 2002 hit, Lilo & Stitch. Now Universal Studios brings him in to helm the live-action remake of another of his beloved animated features, How to Train Your Dragon.
Retaining DeBlois for his live-action narrative debut as director may seem risky, but the reality is that no one knows the Viking settlement on Berk and its fire-breathing pests better than DeBlois. The negative of that is the perennial problem with live-action remakes: What new is there to say?
The reality is nothing, really. When DeBlois and cowriter/director Chris Sanders originally (and very loosely) adapted Cressida Cowell’s books for kids, they created a wild and vibrant world to which DeBlois returns here. It’s a place where Viking chief Stoick the Vast (Butler, returning to the part he originally voiced) gleefully leads his hairy mob against the swirling hordes of deadly wyrms, and less gleefully deals with his disappointment of a son, Hiccup (The Black Phone’s Thames). “Cerebral but clumsy” is the worst combination for a Viking, and the only way Hiccup can make the situation worse is by befriending a dragon. Which, of course, is what he does when he first injures and then bonds with Toothless, a rare kind of dragon called a Night Fury.
Toothless is one of the great designs of fantasy cinema, a unique mix of snake, bat, kitten, and axolotl whose black-scaled face can transform from terrifying to playful in a flash. It was a great design in the 2010 original, and it’s a great design here as well. It’s the same, just as Berk looks the same, and Stoick looks the same, and Hiccup looks the same. It’s the same story, almost beat for beat, as Hiccup stops fearing dragons and learns to co-exist with them. It’s funny and spectacular and charming and exactly what we saw 15 years ago, even if it somehow takes DeBlois half an hour longer to tell exactly the same story.
There are some tweaks, none of which add much. The Norse settlement of Berk has become a multi-ethnic warrior enclave where everyone still dresses like Vikings (when in Roskilde, I suppose). As is immediately obvious with Toothless, the animation team had already done the heavy lifting on the design, and the remake just highlights the control over visuals that animators have compared to this CG-enhanced wilderness. The best moments come close to the rugged wonder of the original, and the worst look like washed-out imitations.
There’s little space for the cast to do anything new, so it’s more about the shading within the existing lines. Thames understands this, and channels Jay Baruchel’s original voice work as Hiccup excellently, making him the best possible live-action version of the cartoon version of the character. Beyond Butler, who was born to play this part, few casting decisions match the original. Out of Hiccup’s friends, only the cocky Snotlout (Howell) matches the unlikely hero in this remastering. Meanwhile, hardheaded warrior teen Astrid (Parker) loses her prickly charm to become merely a prematurely ambitious martinet, and Nick Frost just does the Nick Frost thing as blacksmith Gobber. Moreover, this new performance of the script unbalances the narrative, as the environmental subtext gets overshadowed by the clash between fathers and sons.
The cinematic equivalent of a good revival of a great production, for newcomers this version of How to Train Your Dragon may become a favorite. But fans of the original will likely just want to rewatch the animated version or maybe book a vacation at Universal Epic Universe theme park to visit the recently opened Isle of Berk land (and maybe that’s the real plan here). In its elaborate redrawing, the remake definitely doesn’t erase the original, but it can’t replace it either.
This article appears in June 13 • 2025.