This weekend, Universal will release one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year into theaters: Wicked. And when people line up to watch it, they'll see a trailer for one of the most hotly anticipated movies from next year: a live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon, another Universal joint.
Some theaters are having early screenings of Wicked (our review will be up later today). Attendees at those screenings also got to see the How To Train Your Dragon trailer early. Naturally, the trailer has already made its way onto the internet. UPDATE: Since we wrote this, Universal released a proper version of the trailer, which you can watch above!
Loosely based on the 2003 book by Cressida Cowell, How To Train Your Dragon is about a Viking boy named Hiccup who finds the warlike Viking lifestyle difficult and stifling. As a young Viking, Hiccup is expected to slay dragons, which harry his home village of Berk, but when he comes across a gentle dragon named Toothless, he can't bring himself to act and befriends the dragon instead.
Universal spun How To Train Your Dragon into a successful franchise, producing two more movies. This live-action remake could start the cycle up again. Mason Thames will play Hiccup and Gerard Butler his father Stoick the Vast, who's much more of a traditional, warlike Viking.
By the looks of the trailer, DreamWorks and Universal are taking a literal approach with this remake. The movie isn't giving us a new interpretation of Toothless for the live-action format; he looks pretty much exactly like he did in the animated movies, except he's interacting with human actors now rather than CGI creations. This is the route that Disney has taken with a lot of its live-action remakes of animated classics. That strategy has made Disney oodles of money, so I see why DreamWorks would follow suit.
This isn't the only trailer for the How To Train Your Dragon remake going around. Just the other day, a YouTube channel called KH Studio put out what it called the "first trailer" for the remake, but it's actually a fake trailer made using generative AI:
Be wary of that kind of thing as we get closer to the release date. The live-action remke of How To Train Your Dragon is due out in theaters June 13, 2025. Will Universal want to adapt the sequels as well? That'll depend on how good the first one performs at the box office.
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