We have How To Train Your Dragon at home.
It’s hard not to think something along those lines while watching the new live-action adaptation of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’ beloved animated film. Enjoyable as the new version may be—it hits theaters June 13—it’s such a slavish recreation of its source text that there’s ultimately no real reason to justify its existence.
This time around, How to Train Your Dragon’s young underdog hero Hiccup is played not by a grousing Jay Baruchel in a voice acting performance, but as a human by newcomer Mason Thomas (The Black Phone).
Through an opening voiceover nearly identical to the previous film, Hiccup introduces us to his far-flung home island of Berk, where his village of battle-hardy Vikings constantly fend off fiery dragon raids. Even decades into an ill-fated battle against the dragons that has left most of Berk’s remaining residents several limbs short at best, its warriors remain hell-bent on finding the beasties’ nest and destroying them once and for all.
While Hiccup has become a talented blacksmith, his utter lack of battle skills have made him a target of nonstop mockery from his peers. It doesn’t help that fighting prowess is all that seems to matter to his father, legendary island chief Stoick the Vast (a heavily bearded Gerard Butler), whose aversion to heart-to-hearts would put the gruffest Boomer dad to shame.
So in a bid to impress both Stoick and his formidable crush Astrid (Nico Parker) during a fateful dragon raid, Hiccup grabs a launcher that he’s crafted and clumsily joins the fray. It works better than he could’ve imagined—Hiccup doesn’t take down any old dragon, but a Night Fury, a rare, lethal dragon that no human has glimpsed before.
Only, wouldn’t you know it, Hiccup can’t go through with killing the Night Fury when he happens upon it in the forest the next day. He’s cute and misunderstood, actually!
The dragon—who Hiccup names Toothless—is stranded in a nearby ravine, his tail injured by Hiccup’s launcher. With his twitchy ears and wide green eyes, Toothless’ design is so like a giant winged black cat that kids and adult pet lovers alike are bound to fall in love with him all over again (and seeing a slightly more lifelike Toothless thrust into danger in the film’s third act is downright wrenching).
The dragon training skills that Hiccup picks up while bonding with Toothless turn him into an unlikely star in dragon-fighting class, where he finds techniques like rubbing a dragon’s belly or distracting it with a gust of sneeze-inducing dandelion seeds to be far more effective than maces and daggers. Yet even as Hiccup’s success earns him newfound respect from his father and suspicion from Astrid, he’s unable to forget that he’ll be forced to kill dragons who remind him of his pal all too soon.
Whereas the original How to Train Your Dragon clocked in at a breezy 93 minutes, the latest iteration lasts nearly two hours. While some of that time inevitably goes toward the CGI-laden final battle, the film’s extended runtime feels notably less egregious than many of its live-action counterparts’, thanks to its interest in fleshing out Hiccup’s relationships rather than bloating the straightforward story with convoluted lore.
Stoick benefits the most from this extra time, transforming the character from a one-note macho man with a sudden change of heart into a patriarch whose rigid, fear-driven worldview is upended when he finally learns to meet his son where he is.
Swapping 3D computer animation for live-action is more of a mixed bag. How to Train Your Dragon sequels may have revitalized animated filmmaking thanks to DreamWorks’ cutting-edge software, but in 2025, flesh-and-blood performers are a whole lot more watchable than the studio’s dated 2010 character designs.
It helps that Thomas’ eager-to-please pluckiness is also far more suited to Hiccup’s earnest desperation to prove himself—Baruchel inexplicably voiced the character with all the grumbly world-weariness of a put-upon father of three.
It’s the flight sequences that lay the limitations of a “live-action” approach on display. In giving up its animated world, the new How to Train Your Dragon is forced to rely on jerky quick cuts and desaturated backgrounds. There’s still a sense of wonder to be had, but when held up against the vivid pink clouds and aerobatic choreography of its predecessor, it’s a decided step down.
Seeing how this How to Train Your Dragon shines when it’s given a moment to carve out its own identity only makes its risk-averse devotion to copying the original film all the more disappointing.
If you told me that DeBlois—who returns as director and screenwriter—simply copy-pasted his original screenplay into a new Final Draft document and sprinkled in a handful of scenes, I would believe you. Like last year’s Mean Girls remake and countless Disney live-action cash grabs before it, the uncanny experience of watching familiar dialogue and shot compositions transposed onto a slightly different product robs the new version of much of its transportive power.
Universal can make as many claims as they’d like about their artistic reasoning for remaking How to Train Your Dragon. Yet no matter what they say, I’d wager that the main reason for this film’s existence is so that it can promote an Isle of Berk land in the company’s recently opened Epic Universe theme park.
At least this movie boasts the same lovable characters, heartfelt underdog storytelling, and witty quips of its predecessor. If you’re looking for something kid-friendly to watch in air-conditioned darkness over summer vacation, you could do a whole lot worse.
Hiccup, Toothless, and the rest of the gang have plucky charm to spare, but Universal’s smarmier corporate machinations? Well, there’s something they can’t quite outrun.
