DeBlois clearly has the talent to innovate and entertain. Yet here we are, watching regurgitated intellectual property because it’s a safe bet.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025, directed by Dean DeBlois) does the unthinkable in live-action: it delivers an excellent remake while simultaneously proving, yet again, why live-action remakes should not be given more oxygen.
DeBlois is no stranger to the franchise—he kickstarted the animated films and previously wrote and directed Walt Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002). The guy knows his stuff. It would have been better if Hollywood had given him the chance to forge new stories instead of retreading old ones.
DeBlois clearly has the talent to innovate and entertain. Yet here we are, watching regurgitated intellectual property because it’s a safe bet.
The live-action How to Train Your Dragon boasts mind-bogglingly amazing special effects. The dragons audiences fell in love with in the animated films are rendered with painstaking detail, down to the last scale. The creature design is astounding, making these reptilian beasts both cute and endearing. The action sequences involving the dragons put recent blockbusters—Mission: Impossible included—to shame.
Remarkably, How to Train Your Dragon never lags, an impressive feat for a fantasy film layered with real-world issues: resource extraction, the demonization of the unknown, and the classic discordant father-son dynamic.
This feels especially poignant during Pride Month, given how deeply the How to Train Your Dragon franchise is embedded in themes of queerness and societal control. Just look at the names of the father and son. The chieftain, Stoick the Vast (played by original voice actor Gerard Butler, the epitome of masculine gruffness), stands in stark contrast to his son, Hiccup (portrayed by the endearing Mason Thames, who first gained attention as a kidnap victim in The Black Phone [2022, directed by Scott Derrickson]).
The disparity between “The Vast” and “Hiccup” is no accident—it’s a tiny, irritating aberration, a bodily rebellion against destabilization. Hiccups, by definition, are queer. This isn’t to say Hiccup is gay, but he sticks out like a sore thumb in a community that deifies machismo and violence.
Hiccup wants to protect his village but is relegated to assisting Gobber (a delightfully spirited Nick Frost), the town’s blacksmith and inventor. Yet it’s Hiccup’s queerness—his refusal to conform—that ultimately saves the village and redefines the dragons’ role.
Gobber, canonically gay in the animated films, carries hints of homoerotic tension with Stoick, something Frost has acknowledged in press interviews. He’s also confirmed that How to Train Your Dragon 2 is already greenlit. There’s big money in this franchise—one that, ironically, revolves around strangeness and defying cultural expectations. I mean, the protagonist’s dragon is a gummy, adorable creature named Toothless. If that’s not queer, what is?
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social
