If You Love How to Train Your Dragon, Here It Is Again

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.