How To Train Your Dragon may only be 14 years old, but that doesn’t make it immune from Hollywood’s current obsession with live-action remakes. The adorable DreamWorks fantasy adventure about Vikings and Pokémon-style pet dragons is being re-shot with actual humans this time around. Based on the first trailer, at least the reptilian star of the movie looks great.
The movie is about a village chief’s young failson named Hiccup and how he redeems himself through quick wits and a budding but forbidden friendship with a black dragon named Toothless. Gerard Butler is reprising his role as Hiccup’s father but the rest of the cast is completely new, including Mason Thames (The Black Phone) as Hiccup and Nico Parker as fellow village kid Astrid. The remake’s first teaser shows Hiccup refusing to wage war on dragons as his father demands, and his pivotal first meeting with Toothless.
Toothless, the main draw of the movie, looks excellent. Imagine taking the creature from the original 2010 movie and giving him an Unreal Engine 5 makeover, just without all the uncanny valley stuff. The rest of the movie looks less spectacular, with dense fog and heavy special effects begging the question of why, exactly, you should make a live-action version of a cartoon about epic battles and fantastical creatures in a mythical land untouched by time.
Profit motive, for one, and a creatively bankrupt Hollywood for another. Even Butler basically just looks like someone cosplaying the CGI version of the character instead of giving audiences something genuinely new and different. Maybe as we get closer to the remake’s release, what Universal shows will get more convincing. At the very least, kids will love another reason to watch Toothless be cute and ferocious in equal measures all over again.
The live-action How To Train Your Dragon is out on June 13, 2025. In the meantime, the original version—an all-time classic—is streaming on Max, Hulu, and other platforms.
