Summary

  • The live-action adaptation of How to Train Your Dragon faces a major issue in replicating the visual variety of dragon designs and distinguishing them in a realistic manner.
  • Cutting down the screen-time of dragons to save on CGI costs is not an option, as the dragons are crucial to the world and story of How to Train Your Dragon.
  • Balancing the exaggerated dragon designs of the animated films with realistic translations in live-action will be challenging, as previous attempts have either resulted in non-emotive faces or nightmarish designs.

A live-action How to Train Your Dragon movie is confirmed to be in the works, but the format change already presents a major issue. The original How to Train Your Dragon is a bona fide animated classic. Loosely adapted from Cressida Cowell’s children’s book of the same name, How to Train Your Dragon follows Hiccup, a young, clumsy Viking who seeks to break his tribe's traditions by training dragons rather than slaying them. The film was a major hit for DreamWorks, pulling in almost $500 million, and spawning two sequels which earned even more.

The announcement that Universal is working on a How To Train Your Dragon trilogy is highly regarded, and an unnecessary remake risks spoiling that legacy. One key element of the adaptation in particular could bring about the downfall of How to Train Your Dragon's live-action adventure.

How To Train Your Dragon Can't Give The Dragons Smaller Roles To Save Money

Several different dragon species standing together in How to Train Your Dragon.

The cost of CGI will be one of the live-action How To Train Your Dragon movie’s biggest challenges. While it is common Hollywood practice to cut down the screen-time of an expensive CGI creature for live-action adaptations, as Game of Thrones did with the Stark family’s direwolves, this will simply not be possible with How to Train Your Dragon. The dragons are simply too important to the world and the story. Moreover, audiences have already seen dragons feature abundantly in the animated How to Train Your Dragon films. Noticeably fewer dragons in live-action would look inferior by comparison.

What distinguishes How to Train Your Dragon from other dragon movies is how all three releases explore a colorful and imaginative variety of dragon breeds and designs. This is one of the major advantages of the animated medium, ensuring the dragons are easily distinguishable thanks to vastly different features and proportions. This visual variety will once again add to the CGI cost in live-action, since it means that VFX artists will not be able to get away with reproducing the same CGI model over and over for scenes that require multiple dragons.

Why How To Train Your Dragon's Live-Action Dragons Will Be Difficult To Get Right

Toothless grinning in How to Train Your Dragon

How to Train Your Dragon's exaggerated dragon designs - which are intended to give each dragon an individual, endearing character - will be difficult to perfect in live-action. Realistic translations of non-human animated designs often struggle to get the features exactly right. Designs typically either tone the original versions down dramatically, resulting in non-emotive, indistinct faces, such as with Disney’s live-action The Lion King, or they attempt to photo-realistically transfer the humanlike features, resulting in the nightmarish initial Sonic the Hedgehog design. How to Train Your Dragon will have to delicately thread this needle in order to properly execute one of the most important aspects from the animated trilogy.