How to reskin your franchise.

There’s a line in Marvel’s Avengers, where Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are arguing, and Stark tells Captain America that “everything special about you came out of a bottle”. Stark is, as he will come to learn, wrong but it’s a line that comes to mind every time people rave about Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige – because everything great about that movie comes from the source novel by Christopher Priest. The reason I bring this up is that while 2025’s How To Train Your Dragon is undeniably great fun, everything that’s great in it comes from the dragonfire-in-a-bottle captured by the 2010 original.

You can almost hear the studio mandate: don’t break it, just reskin everything with photorealistic fur, skin and scales. The live-action How To Train Your Dragon isn’t here to reinvent anything – it’s here to remind you what worked the first time, only this time with pores, windblown hair, and a dragon you could almost reach out and touch. It’s a skilled reproduction of an old master, and for the most part, it works precisely because it doesn’t ever try to be more than what it already was.

It helps that what it was remains quietly excellent. The 2010 film slipped a deceptively nuanced story of empathy, disability, and identity into the shape of a mainstream family blockbuster, like a prosthetic tail fin bolted to the familiar anatomy of the hero’s journey. The remake doesn’t meddle with the mechanics. It sticks close to the flight path, swapping stylised charm for textured spectacle and trusting the story to carry itself across the uncanny threshold of realism.

That trust is well-placed. Hiccup’s journey still lands with weight – more literal now, as every misstep and moment of connection plays out on actual faces and in physical spaces. The production design doesn’t reinterpret so much as reincarnate the original animation, bringing it into the tangible world with fidelity rather than flair. Villages, landscapes, even costume textures echo their animated counterparts with almost reverent precision. The dragons, too, are less redesigned than remapped – Toothless in particular feels like the same creature rendered at higher resolution, his physicality deepened but not reimagined, his expressiveness preserved rather than progressed.

The cast are all solid fits, more or less. Mason Thames (The Black Phone) steps into Hiccup’s boots with a convincing mix of nerves and ingenuity, while Nico Parker’s Astrid is given a touch more depth without dragging the pace. Gerard Butler returns as Stoick, the only major holdover from the original voice cast – because, frankly, nobody else could play Stoick quite like Butler – and brings a weightier, more physical authority to the role. There are grounds to suggest that the MVP of this live action remake might be Lucy Bevan, the casting director. Her selections are pitch-perfect reincarnations of their animated forebears. Julian Dennison (The Hunt For The Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2) brings a welcome dose of awkward charm as Fishlegs, while Gabriel Howell delivers a suitably puffed-up Snotlout, though the character’s bluster feels slightly toned down and entwined with a minor redemption story of his own. The twins – Ruffnut and Tuffnut, played by Bronwyn James (Wicked) and Harry Trevaldwyn – are almost too good a recreation of the characters even if they don’t quite match the chaotic snap of their animated counterparts. Even Nick Frost, although initially struggling to fill Craig Ferguson’s vocal boots, eventually comes good with a performance of gruff, bluff warmth that shows why he’s recently been cast in the pivotal role of Hagrid in another upcoming unnecessary reboot.

What’s missing from the film, of course, is surprise. The film plays so closely to the original that even its best emotional beats come with the muscle memory of previous impact. Nothing here falls flat, but there’s little risk either. Where the animated version earned its wings by slipping past your expectations, this version banks on your affection already being secured. It’s a greatest hits tour rather than a debut, and it knows it.

Still, when this How To Train Your Dragon finally arrives at its crescendo – boy and dragon, both maimed, both magnificent, flying as one – it still sticks the landing. Not because of what’s changed, but because the core still hums with the same conviction: that difference isn’t something to overcome, it’s the thing to be embraced to make greatness possible. The remake doesn’t deepen that message, but it doesn’t dilute it either. It simply reaffirms it, with polish, precision, and a little more photorealism.