With many wondering why DreamWorks chose to adapt live-action How to Train Your Dragon cast has been assembled.

The animated fights across the Dragons franchise already, it's unclear what a remake could offer.

How To Train Your Dragon's Live-Action Remake Just Looks Like A Shot-For-Shot Remake Of The Original

The 2025 Dragons movie has been faithful to a fault

DreamWorks has finally revealed its first substantial look at its live-action How to Train Your Dragon movie, and it looks as though the remake has chosen to be painfully faithful to the original. Although the teaser is only a minute or so long, it still manages to reveal a handful of recreated shots from the 2010 movie of the same name. While remakes can often be criticized for straying too far from the source material, the 2025 effort appears to have played it far too safe.

There are several moments from the trailer that have a direct counterpart in the original movie, including Hiccup's success in allowing Toothless to place his hand on his face for the first time. While it's great that iconic moments such as these are being left largely intact, if every shot mimics the 2010 effort, the decision to remake How to Train Your Dragon falls even further under the microscope.

The Point Of A Live-Action How To Train Your Dragon Movie Is Even Less Clear Now

DreamWorks' decision to remake its 2010 movie doesn't seem to include anything new

With the first movie only being released fourteen years ago, it feels far too soon to adapt it for live-action. This feels especially true when the third and final movie, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, premiered as recently as 2019. If a live-action Dragons project has to be made, it would surely make more sense to add to the existing canon rather than retreading the same narrative ground not only so precisely, but also soon after the original saga's cinematic conclusion. In short, DreamWorks' big reveal of their project has raised more questions than it answered.

All three How to Train Your Dragon movies have been hits at the box office, so it could be that DreamWorks' decision to reimagine the franchise from the beginning is largely a financial decision rather than a creative one.

Disney is the studio most known for making live-action adaptations of its movies. However, Disney's live-action movie remakes generally happen decades after the original animated version was released, and the story often feels renewed and looks very different. For example, 1994's The Lion King wasn't given the live-action treatment until 2019, marking a 25-year gap between the original and the remake. Plus, Disney's focus on the lions looking as realistic as possible in the 2019 effort creates a major separation from the 1994 version - even if they are still talking animals. Of course, Moana's live-action remake is an outlier here.

Live-Action How To Train Your Dragon Looks Great Visually, At Least

DreamWorks hasn't cheaped out on the movie's production values

At present, there appears to be very little advantage to watching 2025's How to Train Your Dragon over the original. That being said, at least DreamWorks appears to be putting a lot of effort into making what is essentially a replacement look absolutely amazing from a visual perspective. Not only does Gerard Butler look great as Stoick as he comes back to reprise his role in live-action, but the movie has also avoided falling into a common trap many other remakes of this nature can fall into.

The movie's titular beasts, including Hiccup, have remained pretty much unchanged from a design point of view. The dragons have simply upgraded to align a little more with their new surroundings. Things like their scales are more visible, and more clearly defined, and the beasts generally just look as realistic as they can without losing their signature cartoonish aesthetic. Given how bad the original Sonic the Hedgehog looked in his 2020 movie before the animators were pressured into a redesign, it's a huge relief to see How to Train Your Dragon hasn't made the same misguided move.

Sources: Rotten Tomatoes, Box Office Mojo