Over at Epic Universe, the latest theme park at the Universal Resort down in Florida, there’s a land within the park that attempts to recreate Berk, the fictional cliffside Viking town from the How to Train Your Dragon DreamWorks movies (originated in a book series and perpetuated in several different TV shows). The cliffside aspect goes largely ignored, but there are animatronic dragons, dragon-related rides for a variety of age groups, and an elaborate stage show where puppet dragons march across the stage and, at a few points, fly up through the rafters. The show itself is corny, 30 minutes’ worth of threadbare plot on which to hang some splendid practical effects. But those puppet-craft effects are neat, even a touch awe-inspiring, as the show aims for the Disney theme park magic of obvious but impeccably executed illusions.
I’ve said before that Disney’s series of live-action-ish remakes of their animated classics are akin to that theme-park-style experience: a high-tech recreation where the goal is to draw the audience into a version of a familiar world, rather than provide a full reimagining. (The Tim Burton-directed expansions of Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo, like them or not, are an exception.) The new live-action-ish How to Train Your Dragon offers a DreamWorks version of the Disney process, running in parallel to both the theme park and the original film – after all, that was a DreamWorks cartoon from filmmakers Chris Sanders and DeBlois, who made Lilo & Stitch, subject of its own summer 2025 live-action remake. (For that matter, How to Train Your Dragon was sort of a kid-friendlier Avatar in 2010, and now so goes its sub-Pandora theme-park land.) It all winds up the same place, doesn’t it?
The new How to Train Your Dragon is not as dispiriting as the new Lilo, where every change manages to ding or diminish the original story. Dragon makes no such missteps in part because it takes no such chances. It is the entire story of the 2010 original, re-rendered into a live-action fantasy with many animated visual effects, featuring no discernible changes. Doubtless some will nonetheless discern them. Some dialogue altered, perhaps? Clunky opening narration mildly reworded, though certainly not discarded? Maybe Astrid (Nico Parker), the young female lead, is played a little more badass and aggressive in this telling? Hard to say without a rewatch in close proximity. Easy to say, though, that any deviation feels more inevitable and/or accidental than artistic or even strategic.
This should theoretically make How to Train Your Dragon ’25 fine for newcomers, at least. It’s a sturdy story: Hiccup (Mason Thames) is a teenage Viking raised by single father Stoick (Gerard Butler, here to flesh out his vocal performance from the original), chief of the Berk faction, and hopelessly unqualified in the field of dragon-slaying, which seems to be the main Berk profession apart from farming frequently purloined sheep. Hiccup is a whiz with gadgets but not as burly or fearless as many of his peers; inflamed by a desire to belong, rather than genuine bloodlust, he constructs a weapon that manages to take down an elusive “Night Fury” dragon. But when he attempts to finish the wounded creature off, he feels empathy for its fear and helplessness. Slowly, he and the dragon, christened Toothless, form a bond. This in turn has Hiccup rethinking his tribe’s relationship to the swarms of dragons that periodically attack them (or, really, retaliate for the Vikings’ repeated attacks) – all while unexpectedly rising to the top of his dragon-fighting class by using his new knowledge of the creatures to subdue them without hurting or killing them. This displaces his high-achieving crush Astrid, who grows suspicious of Hiccup’s newfound acumen; his father just swells with pride. A human-dragon showdown looms.
All of this proceeds cleanly enough in the new film. There are maybe even a few moments where the more “realistic” but still fanciful dragon designs inspire something like delight, or where Hiccup and Toothless soaring through the sky approximates the more exhilarating moments of the original (which, again, was basically a junior version of better sequences from the then-recent Avatar). Most of the time, though, How to Train Your Dragon’s live-action craft fails to match the equivalent in its animated counterpart, even with original filmmaker Dean DeBlois on hand for his live-action feature debut.
Somehow, adapting material he shaped to begin with, DeBlois seems in over his head, especially before Toothless (nearly as durable and endearing a creation as Stitch) enters the picture. He stages an early dragon attack with a dumbfounding lack of editing flow, somehow managing to confuse the geography of the limited locations shown, while also avoiding fixing on a single memorable image. In some cases, even a visible image would be an improvement; like so many Disney remakes before them, DreamWorks has mistaken murk for realism, bathing night or predawn or foggy weather in the same grayish haze. Bill Pope, who shot movies as splendidly bright, saturated, or visually distinct as The Matrix, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Spider-Man 2, Alita: Battle Angle, and Clueless, was presumably hired for his more recent murk-conversant experience in the MCU. This movie tramples all over him, with scenes shot as square and flat as a checkbox. The theme park is more dimensional.
This isn’t shocking, or even all that depressing on its own. (There are, as mentioned, three movies and multiple TV series that tell fresher stories in the world of How to Train Your Dragon, and hey, if you’re in Orlando, the stage show is cool, too.) But it does represent logical and very 2020s endpoint for DreamWorks, which began its life as Hollywood’s first new movie studio in decades, complete with its own Disney-style animation division. The studio was eventually downgraded into a production shingle, and DreamWorks Animation spun off into its own entity, which has recently outsourced much of its formerly in-house productions. The initially bold decision to compete with Disney has been boiled down to imitation, which now means imitating its own past glories, too. Ideally a family-friendly adventure film would be capable of inspiring an adult to feel more than: Well, here are the last profitable remnants of another age.
Director: Dean DeBlois Writer: Dean DeBlois Starring: Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gerard Butler, Nick Frost, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn Release Date: June 13, 2025
