TRAILER: How To Train Your Dragon (2025)
“When you carry this axe, you carry all of us with you.”
Today, Universal dropped the first teaser trailer for the live-action remake of DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon. It’s essentially a shot-for-shot recreation of Hiccup (Mason Thames) and Toothless’ first proper introduction with Stoick’s (Gerard Butler) voiceover straight from the animated movie. The scene in this trailer is where the image that Empire shared last week originates. We even hear John Powell’s gorgeous score from the original all throughout the trailer. Director Dean DeBlois returns to remake his own film under the company that now owns DreamWorks just fifteen years after the original captured the hearts of millions. Check out the teaser here:
Well, it looks exactly the same as the animated How to Train Your Dragon, but in live-action. They even kept Toothless’ design exactly the same, for some reason. I love Toothless; I have a little figurine of him and his Build-a-Bear! But maybe in live-action, he should look a little different, perhaps less cute and cuddly. I already thought it was odd to remake a DreamWorks movie, as they don’t have the same mythic status as Disney films, except for maybe Shrek, ironically. But now we see they’re really doing the Disney remake method, literally just making the same exact movie again. I don’t want it, and I don’t know anyone who does or would. I’ve already said I like Mason Thames just fine as Hiccup, and Gerard Butler was great as Stoick in the animated trilogy, so I’m good with bringing him back. But remaking a near-perfect movie (that isn’t even twenty years old!) is unnecessary and foolish. And keeping Butler reminds me of The Lion King keeping James Earl Jones, implying they’re the most important factors in their respective movies. I don’t think any one actor should be the same if most are being changed, and Stoick wasn’t the most important or iconic character in the original How to Train Your Dragon. I know why they won’t (money), but I wish they would get creative and go in a different direction. The books by Cressida Cowell are very different from the movies; why not explore that? I really hope they don’t remake all three movies, as How to Train Your Dragon 2 isn’t very good, and I don’t want to relive the drama with Hiccup’s mom.
However, I will try to be fair to this trailer; the cliffs of Berk look amazing. The costumes are pretty accurate to those in the original movie, and Toothless is technically rendered well, even if I find his design ill-suited to a remake in a different medium. I love John Powell’s original score for the 2010 film, so of course, it works here, too. But the fact that they can play the original movie’s soundtrack seamlessly in the remake is emblematic of the problem. This is the exact same movie, at least based on all we know and have yet seen. That’s all well and good for the executives and likely a lot of moviegoers, but it doesn’t work for me, and I know plenty of us are tired of seeing the same material recycled. I love How to Train Your Dragon and its sequels, albeit to a lesser extent. I wish they would just let it lie rather than reviving it as a live-action adaptation nobody wants.
But what do you think? Did you like the trailer, and are you happy they’re remaking How to Train Your Dragon as a live-action film? Are you going to watch the movie when it comes out next year? Let us know in the comments!
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