Toothless looks great in live action How to Train Your Dragon

How to train your dragon may only be 14 years old, but that doesn’t make it immune to Hollywood’s current obsession with live-action remakes. DreamWorks’ adorable Pokémon-style fantasy adventure about Vikings and pet dragons is being reimagined with real people this time around. Based on the first trailer, at least the film’s reptilian star looks good.

The film is about a village chief’s young errant son named Hiccup and how he redeems himself through quick wits and a budding but forbidden friendship with a black dragon named Toothless. Gerard Butler reprises his role as Hiccup’s father, but the rest of the cast is all new, including Mason Thames (The black phone) as Hiccup and Nico Parker as the village child Astrid. The remake’s first teaser shows Hiccup refusing to wage war against dragons as his father demands, and his crucial first encounter with Toothless.

Toothless, the main feature of the film, looks excellent. Imagine taking the creature from the original 2010 film and giving him an Unreal Engine 5 makeover, just without all the uncanny valley stuff. The rest of the film looks less spectacular, with dense fog and heavy special effects that beg the question of why exactly you should make a live-action version of a cartoon about epic battles and fantastic creatures in a mythical land untouched by time.

Profit motive for one, and a creatively bankrupt Hollywood for another. Even Butler basically just looks like someone cosplaying the CGI version of the character instead of giving the audience something completely new and different. Perhaps what Universal is showing will become more compelling as we get closer to the remake’s release. At the very least, kids will love another reason to see Toothless being cute and ferocious in equal measure again.

The live action How to train your dragon will be released on June 13, 2025. Meanwhile, the original version – an all-time classic – is streaming on Max, Hulu and other platforms.