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Go behind the scenes of How to Train Your Dragon with Mason Thames and Nico Parker
Featurette: DreamWorks/Universal Pictures

How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Directed by Dean DeBlois
Rated PG
Tamed 13 June 2025
#HowToTrainYourDragon

The dragon is Toothless and the movie is riskless.

Keep Calm and Drag On

There isn’t much new in this remake of the popular 2010 animated feature How to Train Your Dragon, despite its run time expanding out by nearly 30 minutes.

Sure, there’s a new joke (such as one about the origin of a helmet) or a different bit here and there, but it’s still the same story told very much in the same way. It’s about a clumsy misfit named Hiccup (now played by the likable Mason Thames, The Black Phone), who’s the son of the village leader, Stoick (played then and now by Gerard Butler, The Phantom of the Opera). They live in a rough-and-tumble Viking village called Berk, where the "pests" aren’t mice or skunks. They’re dragons.

Hiccup would love to kill a dragon, thinking it’d elevate him to hero status and, more importantly, serve as an inroad to getting a date, maybe even a full-fledged girlfriend. Somebody like Astrid (Nico Parker, the live-action Dumbo), the village’s up-and-coming female dragon warrior, would be perfect. (Give the kid credit: he dreams big.)

As it happens, Hiccup manages to knock a dragon out of the sky using a contraption he built to compensate for his lack of physical prowess. Hunting down his prey, he sees himself — and a level of fear — in the dragon, whom he dubs Toothless.

In many ways, it is a timely story. Now even more so than in 2010. It’s about finding common ground with those initially deemed "the enemy" or "the monster." As it turns out, for the dragons, the Vikings are every bit as much a monster to them as the dragons are to the Vikings.

There’s also nice little narrative touch-up that shows the village of Berk populated with warriors from all over the globe, united in the cause of defeating the dragons. It’s a bit woke, but it’s also a nice way of explaining away how Stoick and the quartermaster named Gobber (this time Nick Frost, The World’s End) have thick Scottish and British accents. It takes a village to... uh... populate a village. It works here, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with Viking history. Then again, there be dragons out there, so, y’know, slack be given here.

Immaculate Chaos

It's not that this new production is bad, it’s just that it doesn’t do enough to elevate the material and justify its existence.

HTTYD is a decent IMAX experience, particularly with the thunderous sound and a solid portion of the movie presented in the large format. The imagery is sharp, but that’s both good and — oddly — particularly bad in this case.

A new challenge is rearing its ugly head with the increasing focus on movies filmed in (or "for") IMAX. Many movies are merely reformatted for the large-format IMAX screens and the result is a blurry or grainy image. But more movies now are being filmed for the format without fully appreciating the end result’s appearance when viewed on the largest screens available.

It was apparent in the recent Disney fiasco of Snow White. Much of the castle and its environs looked like it was shot on location all right. But that location would seem to be Disneyland. It simply didn’t look the least bit real. It looked cheap despite the multiplicity of millions of dollars spent.

In contrast, when Christopher Nolan filmed Oppenheimer with IMAX film cameras, the entire production went to great pains to film on location and create a sense of authenticity. An entire town was built in the middle of nowhere to serve as the nucleus of the nascent Los Alamos. It was detailed. You could see the nails and the sawdust.

Opphenheimer created its own authenticity, presented a rawness. Both qualities are lacking here, and they’re sorely needed.

Unfortunately, HTTYD falls into a middle ground where some of the movie — particularly the scenes shot in natural settings with natural light — looks great. But the vast majority of the movie is shot on closed sets and the result — as captured by sharp "approved for IMAX" cameras — is a distracting display of artifice. Nothing looks authentic. Instead, everything looks like it’s been made out of resin. Even the wood barricades and stocks look like they’re formed plastic dropped out of a 3-D printer, like mass-market Adirondack chairs made from recycled materials.

Nothing in HTTYD has the appearance of actual stone or steel. Nothing shows the effects of weathered aging or the wear and tear of daily use in a hostile environment shellacked by harsh Scandinavian storms and dragon breath. Even the rusty chains and gates look fake. It’s hard to believe after decades of advancements in filmmaking DeBlois’ north star would be Robert Altman’s Popeye, but that’s the bar achieved in this movie’s level of verisimilitude.

It’s a distraction that undermines a fundamental appeal in moving from animation to the real world. It should bring that fantastical world to life, but not make it look like a filmed amusement park.

Park Your Dragon

And that’s where Epic Universe comes into play.

The last Dragon theatrical release was in 2019. As a trilogy, the Dragon movies were a critical and commercial success that scored big bucks, north of $1.6 billion worldwide. But it’s been a while.

Why go this route now with a live action remake of a movie that’s "only" 15 years old? Is DreamWorks pulling a Disneyesque cash-in on the heels of the Snow White (financial, creative and everything else) debacle and the Lilo & Stitch (commercial) triumph?

It’s a cynical view, but this movie needs to be put in the context of Universal’s bigger ambitions. Only a few weeks ago, Universal opened new Orlando theme park that’s a conglomeration of pop culture settings that includes a world built around How to Train Your Dragon. This movie — unfortunately — seems like a carefully timed vehicle to drive interest in the park more than to create a fully realized live-action Dragon movie.

Indeed, before the movie starts, a commercial runs promoting the HTTYD park.

All-in, Universal already has a live-action sequel set for release in 2027.

How to Frame Your Dragon

Zack Snyder was obsessed with recreating comic book frames on film instead of focusing on storytelling and character chemistry while he basically brought the entire DC film empire down on its knees. Similarly, DeBlois seems fixated on merely putting into a semi-live-action context key scenes from the Oscar-nominated animated film he also directed.

It’s a slavish recreation of the animated world that hasn’t been tempered by reality. The actors are decked out in costumes that mimic the outfits in the original movie. But those costumes look like costumes. As with the sets and props, there is no authenticity, no wear-and-tear reflective of a rough-and-tumble, savage lifestyle in a dangerous environment.

Ultimately, despite all that, the movie’s biggest downfall is that It lacks any "oh wow" moments, those scenes that generate excitement, create a sense of wonder and draw the audience into the world seen on the screen, pre-fabricated or otherwise.

There’s one key scene in the original movie, as the climactic battle between Vikings and dragons heats up. A fireball is catapulted into the dragon’s nest and it illuminates the cave walls covered in dragons. The illumination is quick and it effectively creates a scene of creepiness and impending doom.

The hope was a scene like that would be taken to 11 in a live-action shot, creating a scene even more creepy and more imposing. But it’s not. It’s actually disappointing.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.