How To Train Your Dragon to be subjected to the live-action remake treatment

Dreamworks' most Disney-like film franchise is making a very Disney-like move

By William Hughes | February 16, 2023 | 12:27am

Aux News How to Train Your Dragon

How To Train Your Dragon to be subjected to the live-action remake treatment

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We would actually be way more into this if they used the animatronic dragons from the stage show Photo: Lisa Lake

Out of all of the Dreamworks animated features that have spilled out into theaters over the last two decades, few have stuck to the Disney playbook more faithfully than How To Train Your Dragon—mostly to pretty good effect. (Eight billion Toothless plushies and a handful of Oscar nominations can’t be wrong!) Even so, there’s “Doing what Disney does” when it comes to making animated films…and “Doing what Disney does to the corpses of its own films after it’s done harvesting them for resources in the 2010s” and it sounds like Dreamworks is finally graduating to the latter.

Which is a roundabout way of reporting that, yep, How To Train Your Dragon is about to get a live-action remake, replacing all that bold, colorful CG animation with…more drab CG animation, with some humans on green screens “standing” near it. This is per THR, confirming that Dean DeBlois (who directed or co-directed all three Dragon films, while also co-writing them while working off of Cressida Cowell’s books) will now be bringing Hiccup, Toothless, and the rest of the Norse-ish village of Berk to grey-toned life.

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(And, look, we know we’re being cynical about this, but there’s only so many Lion Kings you can sit through before starting to see the muddy, indistinct writing on the wall.)

DeBlois (who’ll write, direct, and produce the new film) is reportedly casting around for live-action replacements for his voice cast, which included Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, Gerard Butler, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and more. The film is being set up at Universal, which also released How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World back in 2019, while also distributing two of the three Dreamworks Dragons spin-off TV shows; the new movie is currently scheduled for a March 14, 2025 release date.