Here’s a little known music fact: When Olivia Rodrigo wrote the song “déjà vu,” she was actually tapping into the experience of watching the How To Train Your Dragon remake‘s first full-length trailer. At this point, there have been three films, three television series, a handful of official short films, multiple video games, comic books, and graphic novels, a full theme park land, and even a touring arena show added to the How To Train Your Dragon franchise. Does the latest entry add anything new? Not in the trailer, except for a flesh-and-blood version of Hiccup (Mason Thames) who looks astoundingly similar to his cartoon counterpart. They didn’t even cast a real dragon to play Toothless! So much for that whole “live-action” thing, huh?
If you’ve seen the original 2010 film, you’ve basically already seen the above clip. It recreates the scene where Hiccup—a renegade young Viking who wants to befriend the land’s dragons instead of killing them—reaches his hand out to Toothless almost exactly (just minus the Academy Award-nominated animation that made the original so charming). Even the music is the same.
Trying to give this new version some raison d’être (besides the money, of course), writer-director Dean DeBlois said, per The Hollywood Reporter, “With the rushed production schedule and the limited resources that we had on that first movie for DreamWorks, there were things that we skipped past that we could have maybe done a little more justice to—some of the characters, some of the depth of relationships and the immersive action.” It seems like most of that was already accomplished by the aforementioned sequels, shows, comic books, and games, but maybe, like Hiccup and his fire-breathing pal, this film will buck tradition and surprise us.
Either way, How To Train Your Dragon is out from Universal June 13. If you do buy a ticket, just try not to watch the original in the immediate leadup to your screening. You’ll spoil the whole thing.
