Review: 'How to Train Your Dragon' Remake Is Little More Than Nostalgia-Driven, Blockbuster-Budgeted Cosplay

It's a well-made, handsomely staged recreation that plays like, production value and aspirations aside, a two-hour version of 'How to Train Your Dragon On Ice’.

How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
125 minutes
rated PG for “sequences of intense action and peril”
Written and directed by Dean DeBlois
Based on the books written by Cressida Cowell
Produced by Marc Platt, Dean DeBlois and Adam Siegel
Starring Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gerard Butler, Nick Frost and Julian Dennison
Cinemagraphy by Bill Pope, Editing by Wyatt Smith and Music by John Powell
Production Companies - DreamWorks Animation and Marc Platt Productions
Opening theatrically the week of June 13, courtesy of Universal Pictures

Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon is a mostly well-made motion picture. It is relatively well-acted, competently constructed and handsomely staged, with its $150 million budget mostly on the screen. For those who haven’t seen the original 2010 animated feature (regardless of whether they’ve read any of the Cressida Cowell-penned source material), this live-action remake may play as a compelling and exciting new-to-you YA-targeted fantasy adventure. And for those seeking a slavishly faithful recreation of the DreamWorks Animation flick that launched the preceding decade’s definitive animated franchise, you’ll find that here. However, it’s also another example of how Gus Van Sant’s initially infamous remake of Psycho has evolved from a singular film school experiment into the template for much of what constitutes tentpole-sized franchise filmmaking. I’m tempted to shout to the heavens, “Is this what you want from your theatrical cinema?” but we all know the answer.

This How to Train Your Dragon is so similar to the original that I was tempted just to reprint my 2010 review. I’m retroactively amused at how I framed it by comparing DreamWorks Animation to Wes Craven and Chris Columbus. We never knew which version of each filmmaker (Nightmare on Elm Street or Deadly Friend? Harry Potter or Percy Jackson?) we would get. In this case, How to Train Your Dragon came from the DWA which gave us Kung Fu Panda as opposed to the one that released Shark Tale. Yes, the film does share a plot, obviously not a criticism, with Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends: Foggy Day. Yes, the narrative about two warring cultures realizing they don’t have to kill each other was relevant during the “War on Terror” era. Yes, it still ends with the metaphorical Christians and Muslims teaming up to essentially kill Allah.

There’s no effort to reconfigure the thematic subtext to potentially resonate with (younger?) audiences witnessing the current Middle East massacres. After all, obvious loyalties and sympathies aside, Adam Sandler played in this “Israelis and Palestinians don’t actually have to kill each other over an arbitrary piece of land” sandbox sans controversy in 2008’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Beyond that, it remains a decent variation on a solid formula – think everything from After Earth to the “His Father’s Son” episode of Little House on the Prairie – regarding a stereotypically masculine father figure (Gerard Butler then and still Gerard Butler now) coming to terms with his… “not like the other boys” offspring. And it’s relatively well-made in terms of big-screen production value. Even if potentially intended as Dean DeBlois’s demo reel for future live-action projects, there’s a clear intent to create something approximating a “good movie.”

However, it’s still a tentpole-sized franchise flick, intended to be among Universal’s biggest earners for 2025, that plays like a glorified “How to Train Your Dragon On Ice”-style recreation. Yes, the special effects—both in terms of the dragons and the various aerial action set pieces—and overall visual pageantry justify the expense. However, the human interactions, through little fault of the actors, resemble cosplay and “dress-up,” being stilted in terms of what has come before and strained in recreating previously animated scenes. I felt like I was watching a two-hour version of the How to Train Your Dragon Live-Action Spectacular. I do not recall if the hour-long show, which I had previously seen in late 2013 while on a DreamWorks-themed cruise ship, was an ice show. But you get the idea. It’s an incredible amount of money that primarily serves to remind folks that they liked the 2010 animated feature.

This film is Comcast’s attempt to get in on the “live-action remake of a beloved toon” sub-genre that Disney turned into a semi-regular cash cow during the 2010s. This trend ironically started in March 2010 with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which so overperformed (becoming Hollywood’s sixth $1 billion-plus grosser) that DWA’s How to Train Your Dragon found itself on the defensive a month later when it “only” opened with $43 million. Thanks to rave reviews and strong word of mouth, it would eventually gross $217 million domestically and $495 million globally. Both films were relatively successful partly due to being among the first post-Avatar 3-D tentpoles. Part of How to Train Your Dragon’s appeal was its 3-D flying scenes, which evoked Jake and Neytiri riding banshees and soaring around Pandora. Also, even post-Alice, Disney’s redo machine (Maleficent, Pete’s Dragon, etc.) didn’t go full copy-of-a-copy until Beauty and the Beast in March 2017.

If I’m overly cranky about this well-made and “probably okay if you’re coming in fresh” youth-skewing action fantasy, it’s because – even more so than most Disney recreations – it entirely relies on our existing feelings for “initially beloved because it was new and fresh” animated source material. Aladdin had Will Smith playing the Genie. Even The Lion King had groundbreaking “make it look like a NatGeo doc” animation. Beauty and the Beast topped $1 billion partially on the marquee value of “Hermione from the Harry Potter movies is playing Belle!” This is closer, in terms of facile recreation and stilted awkwardness, to The Little Mermaid (which only had the mere idea of a Black actress as Ariel as a *new* variable), although mostly without the retroactive apologetic story changes. Lacking anything truly new in this version and thus any artistic justification, it is little more than a feature-length “memberberry.