Live-action remakes are a habit that movie-going audiences seem to not be able to break. While previously, the trend was exclusively a Disney thing, this summer, it looks like DreamWorks is going to start following suit with a live-action remake of one of their biggest hits and most popular franchises, How To Train Your Dragon, and the reaction online has been lukewarm at best, if not hostile at its worst (and most frequent). And if the Disney remakes have been any indicator of audience apprehension not affecting box office success, this most recent attempt at cashing in on people’s nostalgia will keep the trend going. What’s worse is this adaptation feels more hollow than most.
A problem that has plagued the Disney remakes is that they’re adapting films that many deem already great and arguably near-perfect. The best examples being Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. The expression, ‘fixing something that’s not broken,’ comes to mind because the adaptations often differ very little from the source material, and what they do change is usually superfluous and doesn’t add much. The Lion King is the most aggressive example, as people have pointed out that it’s essentially a shot-for-shot remake of the original film.
The How To Train Your Dragon live-action remake falls in the same trap because while it makes financial sense to remake something you know people already love, it begs the question: what’s the point? The filmmakers will either have to make changes, which will inevitably irritate the fans because people don’t like change, or they keep it almost exactly the same, in which case, why bother making it at all? The original film isn’t perfect by any means, but its only glaring flaw is that it isn’t How To Train Your Dragon 2, which is arguably one of the best sequels ever made (end of discussion).
The most famous remakes ever made have the esteem they have because they took the basic concepts of the originals and did things entirely differently. You have the obvious ones like The Fly and The Thing, but then there’s Cape Fear, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Magnificent Seven—the John Sturges movie, not the 2016 remake, though that one was fun too—and even Little Shop of Horrors and The Mummy—Brendan Fraser, not Tom Cruise. Those movies didn’t reinvent the wheel, but most of them took movies that were flawed or dated in some way and found a new twist on them to make them feel fresh. With The Magnificent Seven, they switched the genre of an already acclaimed samurai movie and turned it into a Western. The Mummy went from a straight Universal monster movie to a genre-crossing action-horror-comedy. You can make changes as long as the core of the story remains the same, but live-action remakes often just make surface-level changes to justify their existence. It’s the cinematic equivalent of copying off your friend’s answers on homework but rewording it slightly so you don’t get in trouble.
What makes How To Train Your Dragon feel more redundant is that, while other remakes are made by different filmmakers who weren’t involved with the original, allowing different insights on tackling the story, the new film doesn’t have that variety. Not only does the new movie have Gerard Butler come back as Hiccup’s father, Stoick—which immediately leads to unintended parallels to The Lion King with bringing back the late James Earl Jones to play Mufasa—but the film also has Dean DeBlois return as writer/director after co-writing and co-directing the original. He also returned as sole writer and director for every subsequent sequel. If the original films were the John Wick franchise, DeBlois is the Chad Stahelski of the show—Stahelski didn’t write any of the John Wick movies, but you get the idea.
We’re not going to harp too much on DeBlois because, based on promotional material released from the film, it seems like he genuinely loves the world and characters of the original animated trilogy and has a John Lasseter-like sincerity about his love for making movies. The concern isn’t his competency as a filmmaker as much as it is about returning to a story that’s already been told in a similar manner. His being on the creative team makes sense, but if they wanted to see the world in live-action, it seems like it would’ve made more sense to have been made into a limited series rather than a film.
The original films are based on the book series by Cressida Cowell, and book adaptations have been moving more frequently to the longer format of television, with the Percy Jackson series, The Boys, The Witcher, obviously Game of Thrones, and the upcoming Harry Potter series on Max being a few of the major examples. The extended runtime gives the story more breathing room and the potential to be more faithful to the original book. You could argue that that would lead to more changes to what fans who are only familiar with the films would expect, but if you’re only giving them what they recognize, that gives the project an added layer of cynicism. At that point, it’s just things you know, and that’s the problem with all of these remakes. They expect your familiarity with the original film to do most of the heavy lifting regarding the emotional moments. A perfect visual to convey this is in the marketing. People have made side-by-side comparisons of the famous shot of Hiccup petting Toothless for the first time in both the original and the teaser trailer of the new film, and the framing of the shot is exactly the same. They’re recreating the most iconic moment from the original movie verbatim, which makes it feel empty.
That’s the paradox of adaptations: if you have to make changes or trim the fat of the original, that implies that the original is flawed in some way, so if no significant changes are made to the narrative, that would also indicate that the original was fine as it was…so why do it again? Money reasons, obviously. It’s no secret that studios today prefer to put money into projects with an existing track record of financial success, and the fact that they make their tentpole projects with upwards of nine-figure budgets poses a heavy risk. And for as much as people complain about remakes like The Lion King, that movie still made over $1.5 billion at the box office. So, a lot of people clearly aren’t overly concerned about voting with their wallets—the studio doesn’t care if you’re ‘hate-watching’—which in turn means the movies keep getting made.
We’re going to take a minute to defend the concept of a live-action remake of hand-drawn animated films because, stylistically, those have more of an opportunity to expand a world that’s literally two-dimensional and bring it to life with real actors and locations. The reverse is also true when making an animated version of a live-action movie (i.e., the live-action Spiderman franchise and the Spider-verse series). Remaking a CG animated film—a form of animation that’s already supposed to look photo-realistic and three-dimensional—into live-action feels unnecessary since the animation style already has a better sense of scope and depth than hand-drawn animation.
Roger Deakins was even a visual consultant on all three original films, which is a huge reason why they’re gorgeous to look at. It’s weird mentioning camera work in an animated movie where there are literally no cameras, but the films also make the most of the animation style by imitating handheld camerawork and a lot of over-the-shoulder camera angles to make it feel like there’s a camera covering the action in person, like the first time Hiccup crouches over and finds Toothless trapped in the cove, or in the sequel when Stoick is locking up Berk and Hiccup is following behind him. These are little details, but they make the world feel so real. That helps add to the immersion of the animation. You know that none of it is real, but you’re so wrapped up in the illusion that you don’t think about it. When techniques like that are done in animation, it’s unique; when it’s done in live-action, it’s standard.
Just so this doesn’t come across as negativity overload, the one change that the new film has over the original that is a great creative decision is the choice to have Gobber—the character played previously by Craig Ferguson—be played by Nick Frost. No matter how the movie plays out, whether it bombs at the box office or makes all of the money, whether the reviews go through the roof or through the floor, he will be the one element of the film that makes it through unscathed and will likely be the one consistent positive footnote across all reviews, because he’s never not the shining bright spot of any movie he’s in. As far as the rest of the film is concerned, we’ll find out soon enough.
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