I Can’t Properly Review The ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ Remake, And Here’s Why

It’s an odd time in live-action remake history that the 2025 version of How To Train Your Dragon has to arrive in. Disney has had a stranglehold on this market with 19 full or partial remakes since 2015 to diminishing critical and commercial returns.

Each one of Disney’s remakes shamelessly sand off any ‘problematic’ elements of the original while needlessly changing the story and leaning heavily on nostalgia. They still make plenty of money – the utterly woeful Lilo & Stitch has shamefully made $800 million worldwide – but they have become increasingly transparent cash grabs.

The thing with these remakes is that you’re damned either way you approach making it. Looking to change a lot of stuff about the movie? Diehard fans will be pissed off, and you’ll hardly be a remake of that movie. Okay, how about leaving it the same? Now it’s a blatant cash grab banking on nostalgia, and then people will ask what the point is of even making it.

Enter 2025’s How To Train Your Dragon, a live-action remake of the 2010 film of the same name that squarely fits into the second category. Dissimilar to other remake efforts like Aladdin or Lilo & Stitch, this is a film with a single-minded commitment to quite literally recreating the work that it’s based on down to the smallest details.

A one-to-one remake of How To Train Your Dragon

Director Dean DeBlois returns without Chris Sanders at his side to straight up copy and paste the work he did 15 years ago to a ‘new’ film. The remake of How To Train Your Dragon is a shot-for-shot, music-for-music and even performance-for-performance recreation of the original film with only the most minute of changes.

So I ask the simplest of questions: why? Why remake this beloved film that’s not even two decades old in a way that ultimately looks worse and is a little bit longer for no particular reason?

The answer, of course, is money. The original How To Train Your Dragon is one of the most beloved animated films of the 2010s, and I’m confident someone at Universal Pictures crunched the numbers and figured this thing would make a dragon-load of cash.

By sticking so close to the original film, this remake fails to justify its own existence and is naked in its creative bankruptcy. It’s downright shameful that a well-loved, recent film like How To Train Your Dragon is put in the remake machine when it’s hardly aged a day.

But the thing that makes me so conflicted about this remake is that ultimately, 1-to-1 remaking one of the best animated films of the 21st century ultimately still results in a fairly solid movie. Even if you’re reheating the original HTTYD’s leftovers, it can still taste pretty good.

As mentioned earlier, this remake does look measurably worse than its animated counterpart – that’s not even mentioning how much CGI animation there is in the movie – but is still leagues better than any Disney remake. The performances range from acceptable to good, with Mason Thames playing a different but charming Hiccup and Gerard Butler literally replicating his vocal performance from the first film.

And yes, in case you were worried – Toothless looks very cute in this film. They’ve done a great job bringing this fantastic dragon design into a more realistic setting, and he’s animated with all the verve and life he had in the original. In fact, I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if they just reused the animations, it’s that similar.

How do you review a movie that’s already been made?

Moments like Hiccup and Toothless properly taking flight for the first time as John Powell’s now-iconic score plays are great only because they’ve been done before, as is the story that preaches that we sympathize with our enemies rather than mindlessly destroy them. It’s clear that some effort has clearly gone into the whole project to preserve what makes the original so beloved, and many will appreciate that.

But… it’s the same movie! There’s no adaptational effort on display here whatsoever. It makes 2025’s How To Train Your Dragon such a pointless endeavour even in the scheme of remakes. Though I’ve been very vocal about how bad changes in remakes can be by removing everything that makes a story good, doing absolutely nothing also feels like blatant pandering.

And so I’m left with a dilemma: how do I properly review a fairly good movie that I hate the existence of? I’ve decided that I can’t – or rather, won’t – give it a star rating because of these strange feelings I harbour. I cannot accept that this is where we’re at: remaking movies from 15 years ago to nostalgia bait a generation of kids and young adults who haven’t even fully settled into adulthood yet.

If you’re looking to revisit the world and characters of How To Train Your Dragon… well, the original film is right there. It’s a lot cheaper! But I suppose it is a way to revisit this world and characters, given the total copy-paste job that this remake is.

That is its greatest strength and flaw – How To Train Your Dragon 2025 is a solid recreation of a great movie that only exists as a symptom of a very sick cinema culture. It’s a movie that’s already been made, and one that I simply cannot recommend or dignify with a rating given its transparently money-hungry ambitions. Once again, I find myself advocating: just stay home and watch the original.