How to Train Your Dragon (United States, 2025)

I have made my peace with an unsavory truth: the Hollywood of today is going to continue crafting live-action remakes of the animated films of yesteryear until they run out of material. Why? Because audiences like them – more often than not, they score big at the box office. Familiar stories and characters all dressed up in new clothing. Then there’s the nostalgia element, although I doubt it has quite the same impact with a property that’s only 15 years old as it might with something from, say, the 1990s.

For this particular reincarnation of How to Train Your Dragon, Dreamworks has brought back the original animated film’s co-director, Dean DeBlois, to handle the writing/directing duties, as well as actor Gerard Butler to grace the screen as Stoick the Vast not only with his voice (as he did in the three animated stories) but his presence as well. Like Dwayne Johnson in Moana, he has the physicality to go along with the pipes. Sadly, the same cannot be said of Jay Baruchel (original Hiccup), America Ferrera (original Astrid), and Craig Ferguson (original Gobber). They have been replaced by (respectively), Mason Thames, Nico Parker, and Nick Frost.

The story remains solid, although about 30 minutes of mostly-extraneous stuff has been added, bloating the running time to over two hours and creating some pacing issues in the early-going. Still, most of the things that worked about the animated film – the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless the dragon, the playful flirtation between Hiccup and Astrid, and the father/son dynamic between Hiccup and Stoick the Vast – are effective here. That’s mainly because Thames and Parker inhabit their characters effectively and Butler wears Stoick like a comfortable coat that continues to fit. None of the secondary characters are any more interesting this time around but they get more material, which accounts for a lot of wasted screen time.

Our narrator and the main character is the teenaged Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (Hiccup for short), the son of the Viking village's chief, Stoick. Hiccup is a smart, thin guy who prefers reading and designing things to learning ax-wielding, and he longs for a girlfriend – specifically Astrid, although the only times when she singles him out is when she’s pissed off. He's essentially a medieval geek. When dragons attack his town (as they often do), Stoick and Gobber the blacksmith declare war. Stoick gathers the menfolk to seek out the dragons' nest while Gobber puts the next generation through their paces learning how to dispatch the beasties. As usual, Hiccup goes his own way, discovering a wounded Night Fury dragon in the woods and bonding with it, eventually giving it a name (Toothless). He soon realizes that "everything we know about [dragons] is wrong" and they can be kind and generous creatures if treated properly.

It's hard to assess whether the film looks better in live-action than in animation because so much CGI is necessary to bring the dragons to life that whole sections of the film still rely more on keyboard artistry than human acting. Writer/director Dean DeBlois has spoken extensively about trying to use more “practical” (tangible) effects but pretty much all the scenes featuring dragons require heavy computer involvement. In an attempt to develop a synergy between the two versions, he re-created certain sequences using a shot-by-shot replication. (This is most clearly evident in the initial meeting between Hiccup and Toothless.) As is often the case with CGI-rich films, there are almost always occasional moments when things don’t quite look right. Kids won’t care. Adults may not notice. But those paying careful attention might find them distracting. That’s an inherent danger of transforming an animated property to a live-action analog while still keeping elements from the unreal world. Thankfully, these stumbles aren’t nearly as catastrophic as those encountered by Disney in Snow White.

Except for those with a “never” approach to these kinds of remakes, it’s hard to actively dislike the film. It does a decent job with world-building, the characters are effectively realized, the dragons follow their previous designs, and the story uses the same beats. It’s neither as fresh nor as exuberant as the 2010 version, which was an accomplished telling of a familiar-yet-engaging story, but the generated emotions are similar and it crosses the same finish line. I’m not sure that 15 years is a long enough runway (and the third film in the animated trilogy is only six years old) but that’s what we have. How to Train Your Dragon represents solid family entertainment even if it feels like it’s tracing over an existing pattern rather than developing something new.

How to Train Your Dragon (United States, 2025)