We Deserve Better Than How to Train Your Dragon
Two of the biggest movies of the summer were live-action remakes. Those films, Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, prove two things: Hollywood is out of ideas, and audiences love seeing stories they know. I caught the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon during a drive-in double feature with The Smurfs (the less said about this one, the better). I thought to myself, “How could this possibly be bad? I’ve heard it’s the same.”
Guess what? The 2025 edition of How to Train Your Dragon is absolutely fine. It does exactly what the animated movie did fifteen years ago, but adds 25 minutes to the proceedings. I can’t tell you exactly what they added because the most important story bits— Hiccup winning over Toothless the dragon, Hiccup winning over Astrid, and Hiccup winning over his father, Stoick, are still there. I mean, Gerard Butler even reprises his role as Stoick. What are we doing here?
For those who are unaware of How to Train Your Dragon, the story takes place in the Viking village of Berk. Berk is frequently attacked by Dragons, and every Viking has to be trained to fight back against these terrible beasts. Stoick is the village chieftain and considered the bravest among his contemporaries. His son, Hiccup, not so much. Hiccup does his best to please his father, but he knows deep down he’ll never be a dragon killer. Meanwhile, the one dragon breed everyone fears is known as a Night Fury. When fate entwines and has Hiccup face-to-face with a Night Fury, a new partnership between man and dragon becomes possible.
Look, I didn’t hate my time watching How to Train Your Dragon. The performances are fine for the most part (maybe the best performance here is that of Nico Parker as Astrid), and outside the opening sequence, which is painfully dark, the movie looks like the mega blockbuster it’s supposed to be. Universal just opened a new How to Train Your Dragon theme park at Universal Studios, and renewed interest in the brand is exactly what they were looking for. When Universal releases new live-action versions of the next two movies in the trilogy, I fully expect them to make bank at the box office yet again. It’s sad because we, as an audience, deserve more than just a carbon copy of a movie we loved fifteen years ago. [C]
Here are the movies I caught up with in July:
As always, if you’d like to follow along on Letterboxd, my account can be found here.
Podcast
🎙️Episode 200 is here! Evan Crean and I were joined by Toussaint Egan to discuss the post-2000s era of Hayao Miyazaki.
Home Video
In one of my most anticipated home video releases of the year, Kino Lorber released the 1953 classic, Shane, on 4K UHD. Directed by George Stevens, Shane (Alan Ladd) follows a drifter and retired gunfighter who becomes an assistant to a homestead family in crisis. There’s an aging cattleman and his hired gun (Jack Palanace) who mean to run all the homesteaders out of town and claim the land for their own. This was my first watch of Shane, and while I wasn’t as enamored with it as many (AFI once considered Shane as one of the best movies of all time), I did recognize that the true secret of Shane is what isn’t said between its many characters. The 4K transfer isn’t demo material, but it’s probably the healthiest the movie has ever looked. You can purchase a copy for yourself at Kino Lorber.
The namesake of this newsletter and podcast, Sunset Boulevard, is now available on 4K UHD from Paramount Pictures. I didn’t get an opportunity to check out the new disc, but Paramount did provide me with a digital copy that I intend to check out shortly. Sunset Boulevard was directed by Billy Wilder, whose filmography includes such classics as Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, and many others. While I probably prefer Double Indemnity out of all of these, there’s no question that Wilder made some of Hollywood’s most enduring classics. Sunset Boulevard certainly belongs in that company.