Writer/director Dean DeBlois made all three of the animated How to Train Your Dragon films for DreamWorks Animation over the course of the last decade. Loosely adapted from the children’s books by Cressida Cowell, all three films were well-received by critics and audiences. So why revisit this franchise and give DeBlois himself the task of recreating the film he has already made in a different format? Well, it’s the reason any Disney live action remake has been foisted on the moviegoing public – there’s money to be made here. How to Train Your Dragon has proven to be a remarkably lucrative franchise for DreamWorks/Universal, with merchandising and TV spinoffs, video games, expensive and lavish theme park attractions and endless other entities. Does this new ‘theatrical event’ actually warrant a trip to the movie theater?

Teenage Hiccup (Mason Thames) lives on the Viking Island of Berk with his father Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, reprising his role from the originals). The Viking population has lived at odds with the dragons who inhabit the land for as long as Hiccup can remember, and his father wants him to follow in his footsteps as a dragon slayer. By chance, Hiccup injures a widely feared Night Fury dragon, and comes across it and the two immediately share an unmistakable bond. He names the Night Fury dragon Toothless and the two begin to work together. Hiccup aims to end the war between human and dragon and give Toothless and his fellow dragons a better life.

How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is just about as good as any live action remake of an animated film could be. It’s beautifully designed, perfectly cast, and totally captures the wonder and spectacle of the original, and I see no reason why this won’t win over a new generation of young fans and charm the adults who grew up with the original films as kids. However, it’s also pretty much exactly the same movie as the 2010 version. It kind of reminded me of when Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but like a version of that that didn’t actively make me angry the entire time. This film is lovely, emotionally genuine and even thrilling, and the biggest problem it has is that there already exists a better film with the same title.

Mason Thames, who you may remember from 2021’s Blumhouse horror film The Black Phone, plays our hero Hiccup, and he could not be better here. He totally captures the energy and charm of the animated character, and it will be interesting to see his evolution if more of these are made. Nico Parker, who previously starred in Disney’s beleaguered 2019 Dumbo remake and the underseen Hulu coming-of-age film Suncoast, stars as Astrid, who eventually becomes Hiccup’s love interest. And she’s got the perfect energy for this as well. And it’s rather fascinating to see Gerard Butler, who has already played this character in the animated versions, return for this remake, and he makes it work. I can only hope they follow this lead if they continue these live action adaptations and cast Cate Blanchett in the role she played in the second and third films.

If there’s one reason to see the live-action How to Train Your Dragon in theaters, it’s the flight sequences. The way cinematographer Bill Pope shoots these sequences captures the enormity and the wonder of how viscerally exciting they felt in the animated films. In fact, this would be a perfect film to shell out the extra few bucks for the D-Box or the 4DX seats, or whatever the equivalent premium format is at your theater, where the seats shake and move to the action of the film. I saw it in Cinemark’s D-Box format and it was an immersive joy to behold. Lindsay Pugh’s costume design is terrific and very detailed, and it appears production designer Dominic Watkins designed a lot of practical sets to offset all the CGI here, and they look great. John Powell returns to do the score as well, and once we take flight and that theme music swells, it’s hard not to forgive a lot of this film’s shortcomings.

So, ultimately there is no compelling reason for the new How to Train Your Dragon to exist. It’s close to a shot-for-shot remake of the beloved 2010 film, but unlike, say the 2019 remake of The Lion King, it doesn’t sacrifice the magic and wonder of the original film for realism. It’s difficult to describe but there is a very animated sensibility to this new film. It’s a relief that this film is not the disaster a cynic might go in expecting, but it’s also a bit of a bummer that this new version is not really doing anything new. Perhaps Dean DeBlois was tasked with this project and recognized the source material was strong enough to stand up to this challenge on its own, and while that is commendable, it illuminates the cynicism of doing this live-action remake in the first place. However, it still filled me with wonder and moved me when it needed to, and that goodwill goes a long way.