A couple of days ago, I chanced upon a trailer for the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon. The original film, based on the book of the same name, premiered in 2010 and follows the heartfelt adventure story of a young Nordic lad, Hiccup, and his friendly dragon Toothless (who does, in fact, have teeth).

The original movie got great reviews and remains one of my personal favorite animated films. It has memorable and funny characters, a good storyline, and is well animated.

So why do we need a live-action version of the movie?

A Loss of Originality

Disney led the charge with its realistic remakes with live-action representations of Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, and Cinderella, Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid. They also acquired Star Wars, and have spent the last decade riffing on the beloved franchise with movie additions and spinoff shows. Needless to say, the entertainment industry depends a lot on the creative genius of prior generations to function. Even movies like Joker and the Venom trilogy mooch off of preexisting fictional universes. These are villain movies without the intervention of the hero. (What does that say about the moral ethos of the industry?)

It’s almost like Hollywood is becoming a kind of large language model, scraping stories from a storehouse of old ideas and coughing up its fancy but vapid re-creations. With each remake, the audience is left with less confidence that the minds of the movie world care much about baking something fresh. The question is: Why?

With a movie like Beauty and the Beast, a live-action version was understandable. The original animated movie is cartoonish and is a few decades old. A live-action remake might appeal to older people, not just children. But I personally don’t think the remake was able to capture the drama and flavor of the cartoon version. It’s the same story, and the story was good in its original form.

What’s a bit baffling, though, is producing a live-action remake of an animated movie that itself demands a lot of computer-generated imagery. The dragon in the new movie looks a lot like the one in the animated film, which makes sense, because…they’re both animated.

It feels a bit too soon to pine nostalgic on How to Train Your Dragon. I also wonder how different the remake will be. Is it to be darker, more serious, etc? Maybe it will be a totally different story. Who knows?

If we’ve learned anything from Amazon’s The Rings of Power, it takes more than a big budget and cutting-edge CGI to gain a loyal audience. Whether a cartoon or live-action, what we really want is a good story, not just fancy visuals. Dressing up the same story in a new suit might get some traction for nostalgia’s sake, but are cunning visual effects enough to make people flock to the theaters? Maybe. But after a while, constant retelling and rehashing and remaking starts to look a little bit like laziness. Or desperation.