How to Remake Your Dragon

Content warning: violence. And spoilers.

Until this June, it’d been years since I’d last seen a movie in theaters: Frozen II in 2019, at the behest of my high school friend group. I’ve never been a cinema person; there’s something about a big, dark, loud room where one must stay entirely still and silent that unsettles me. I wonder if it’s some kind of primal instinct, a vestigial tail of a phobia that comes from pre-humans lost to snarling, cave-dwelling predators. Almost nothing is worth that ancient tar pit of fear. Almost.

February 19th, 2019, I saw a movie in theaters unprompted by any external force— no peer pressure, no fear of missing out, no mandatory attendance from any overbearing parental figures. At age 15, I forded the raging waters of elementary schoolers, their miserable guardians, and even more miserable cinema staff to see How to Train Your Dragon: the Hidden World on its opening night by choice. At the end of the movie I cried so hard I became ill. It was phenomenal.

I’m sure I need not go on about my lifelong obsession with How to Train Your Dragon; aside from the fact I’ve written at length about it before, my story with this franchise is a common one among the changeling-esque girl-things of my generation. I was an introverted 7-year-old when the first movie was released. I liked nature. I liked cats. I liked telling jokes that only I understood, though this may have been a kind of resigned enjoyment borne of necessity rather than a genuine passion for unfunny standup. I, and many others like myself, was the bullseye of How to Train Your Dragon’s target audience. The bolas hit the Night Fury; I was downed.

And so, when the news came out in 2023 that a “live-action” remake of the original animated film was in development, practically everyone I’ve ever met lost their minds with excitement— not for the film, but for me. I, with my ragged Toothless pillow pet I’d dragged along to college and my bargain bin DVD of the movie still warm from my latest rewatch, should have been bouncing off the walls with joy.

But I wasn’t excited, actually. I was quite upset.

Berk, the island setting of How to Train Your Dragon, is hallowed ground in my spirit; every inch of its atmosphere is sacred, 2010 CGI notwithstanding. Toothless and Hiccup are old friends. Given the track record of other live-action remakes in the past few years, I was not enthusiastic about the maintenance of the original film’s integrity throughout the adaptation process. Like countless other forgettable remakes, I was afraid How to Train Your Dragon would lose its heart in translation— that it would trade meaning for a moneygrab.

I paid only vague attention to news of the remake as the months pushed on, largely unenthused, but it became harder and harder to ignore. The Internet exploded with bigotry when Nico Parker was cast as Astrid; the casting was so obviously not a reason to criticize the film that I lapsed into hate-scrolling about it, downvoting every complaint I could. Unfortunately, this behavior told all my social media algorithms that I wanted to know more, and by the beginning of this summer, every feed on every website I tried to access was targeted: oops, all HTTYD promo. My dislike of the film on the principle of unethical cashgrabbiness heightened and heightened and heightened.

Then, on the morning of June 12th— a day before the movie’s official theatrical release— I received a notification from Spotify that John Powell’s latest album was available to stream. 7-year-old Cara timejumped to peek over my shoulder at the album cover and smile. I booked a ticket right there at my work desk.

Friday the 13th: opening night. The date was fitting. Despite my new excitement about the movie, I still wasn’t sure about the cinema itself. None of my friends were available, so my first time entering a movie theater in almost six years would be unaccompanied. But I’m 21; I have a college degree and a real adult job. I was going to do it scared.

I am very glad I did.

For starters, it turns out not all movie theaters are menacing Platonic caves of loud children and nauseating popcorn odor. That’s just the big ones, the chain theaters, the Carmikes of the world. By sheer luck, I booked my How to Train Your Dragon ticket at a tiny, independent theater in the suburbs of Chicago. Its lobby was more like a daycare than a nightmare: a set of stairs going up to one central desk, outfitted with Party City-like decor on theme with the latest releases. Aside from the staff, I was one of about five people there. The cashier who rang up my M&Ms struck up a chat.

Opening night, he said, you must be a fan. I laughed. You don’t even know.

I got settled into my seat at about 5:40, five minutes before the slated start time. The theater must’ve had at least 200 seats, but an absolute maximum of 30 were filled. Trailers ran for about ten minutes after 5:45, and in that time, maybe 20 more people showed up. Cavelike? Slightly. Full to the brim with monstrous overexcited beasts? No. Unless you count me.

And then: the title sequence. A familiar melody and landscape. This was it. I knew that despite my best efforts, I was going to enjoy the remake no matter what. But whether or not it would be good was a different question.

Reader, it was phenomenal. I frightened that poor cashier on my way out— I’d cried my mascara into two spiderlegged tracks down the sides of my face like some kind of moviegoing wraith. When my friends asked me how the film was, they received paragraphs upon paragraphs of emphatically punctuated nonsense. The next week I braved the theater to see it a second time.

How to Train Your Dragon (2025) absolutely nails it in two very important areas: its casting and its plot departures from the original movie. These successes, I think, are driven by the whole team’s overwhelming respect for the animated film. It’s not a sloppy moneygrab; it maintains the depth of the original movie for the sake of the story and the audience to whom it is so, so important.

Mason Thames plays Hiccup with all the spirit of his animated counterpart— the awkwardness, the compassion, the bravery— but with a 2025 manneristic spin that makes him unique. The remake’s Hiccup is quietly anxious; he’s not as over-the-top and grandiose in his schemes and humor as animated Hiccup. The motivating difference here is that Thames’s Hiccup wants to fit into contemporary ideals of what a teenager should be, in 2025, as portrayed by a real-life teenager in 2025. Jay Baruchel’s animated Hiccup is resonant, too, but in a different, much 2010-er capacity. When I was a kid, I was animated Hiccup; today’s teens are live-action Hiccup.

And the whole cast brings this nuance to their characters. Aside from the obvious showstopper— Gerard Butler reprising his animated role as Stoick the Vast— Nico Parker as Astrid and Gabriel Howell as Snotlout are particular standouts, though the entire “fire brigade” team shines even in their comparatively limited spotlights. Even side characters like Ruth Codd’s Phlegma are genuinely fun and interesting to watch; that attention to detail makes the Berkian archipelago feel real.

This is where the departures from the original plot come in. Like the character performances, they’re tasteful, more additive than flippant. Astrid has reason not to like Hiccup; their dynamic is more interesting with the context that she doesn’t want to kill dragons just to do it, but that she needs to in order to gain the regard and societal position Hiccup has by birth. Snotlout is likeable because we know his arrogance is false; he’s a kid who just wants to be seen, especially by his own father. The Vikings are, in the remake, a diverse group who’ve gathered on Berk from across the seas to unite against the dragons rather than a homogenous, unexplained village. Within the first 20 minutes of the film we learn the name of Stoick’s lost wife, Valka— the privilege of that foreshadowing awarded by the movie’s status as a remake in the first place.

What confirmed the status of How to Train Your Dragon (2025) as a “good movie” in my mind, though, was the turning point scene towards the end. As in the animated film, Hiccup’s performance in the arena is awarded with the high Viking honor of killing a Monstrous Nightmare. He tries instead to convince the crowd that dragons should not be killed; he almost succeeds, but Stoick, betrayed by his son’s rejection of Viking society and, thus, his family, intercepts the demonstration with a loud strike upon the metal netting over the arena. The Monstrous Nightmare is spooked by the noise. Chaos erupts in the ring.

When I was a child watching How to Train Your Dragon (2010) back-to-back-to-back-to-back on my family TV, this scene wasn’t one that stood out to me. I liked to match the different sequences in the movie with the names of my favorite songs off the soundtrak— “This is Berk,” “New Tail,” “Astrid Goes For A Spin,” “Where’s Hiccup?”— so I know by the exclusion of the corresponding song’s title in my memory that this final arena scene passed me by as a kid. My focus slipped away from me as soon as Toothless soared in to save his friend. This was just the part that meant the movie was over soon. Can we cut to Astrid and Hiccup watching the boats leave now?

The remake departs from the animated film in this scene. It’s brief; if you don’t have the original movie memorized the way I do, you might not even realize it’s new. In the animated version, Hiccup dashes around the ring in a desperate attempt to escape the Monstrous Nightmare’s attacks, and out in the distant forest, Toothless picks up the sound of the struggle. All this is the same in the remake, save for one shot just before Toothless breaks into the arena.

Thames’s Hiccup reaches one hand out in a panic, scrabbling to get a grip on stone that will not yield. We cut to Toothless’s paw, outstretched in exactly the same position, as he tries frantically to claw his way to his friend. Their terror is identical.

After that, the scene returns to the animated script: Toothless breaks into the ring, and though he successfully defends Hiccup from the Monstrous Nightmare, he can’t fly away before Stoick and a dozen other Vikings apprehend him. Hiccup begs them not to hurt his dragon friend, says the yelling and fighting and pinning him to the ground will only make it worse. They do it anyway.

In the theater on opening night, I saw something in the remake’s arena scene I didn’t see as a kid, or maybe that I didn’t want to see as a kid. Hiccup and Toothless are obvious parallels of each other throughout the whole story of How to Train Your Dragon, but I always related more to Hiccup— the outcast introvert searching for a friend by choice, rather than the wounded dragon who finds one in necessity. That one quick cinematography shift, fingers to claws scrabbling on stone, made me realize I might be more Toothless than I’d imagined.

I was a curious, strong-willed kid. I didn’t understand the logic of the adults around me and often questioned their ways of being, which to them was a violation of said ways, and I got in more and more and more serious trouble for it, never knowing why. I stood up for friends mistreated by teachers and was reprimanded: this is between me and her. I tried to express how I saw the world, what I thought fairness was, that I didn’t comprehend the way we all treated each other, and for it, I was punished.

A dragon sees a senseless injustice and the grave danger it entails; he soars in to help, and maybe he’s loud and angry, but more than that, he’s frightened. He wants things to be right. He doesn’t deserve to be tackled to the ground and rebuked. He has a good heart.

I have a good heart.

How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is a phenomenal movie. It’s the first successful live-action remake I’ve ever seen— doubly a feat given the quality of its animated source material, which is inscribed on my ribcage like the runes of a curse, or blessing. I saw it on opening night in theaters and sobbed, and the next week, I went back to the theater and saw it again.

Kiera came along. We sat, much like my first viewing, in the center of a nearly-empty cinema; less like my first viewing, I knew what to expect, and I knew it was something profound and gut-wrenching and important to me. And I had people I care about right there with me to feel everything I felt. To understand why these movies mean so much to me.

A kid, maybe 7 years old, sat behind us and loudly called out all the differences she’d spotted from the animated film. An older woman in front of us turned around at the end of the movie looking profoundly affected. That was so good, she said. The girl behind us chattered excitedly to her family as she left the theater.

Kiera and I looked at each other.

You don’t even know.

Hey there, Toothless!