It was only a matter of time before DreamWorks jumped on the lucrative live-action remake bandwagon with its soulless new How to Train Your Dragon. Disney has been playing this cynical game since 1994 – releasing their Jungle Book remake (the one starring Jason Scott Lee) the same year DreamWorks was founded – and striking gold with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), which arrived in theatres just weeks before the original How to Train Your Dragon landed.
It also comes as no surprise that DreamWorks moved with Night Fury speed to revisit a movie that’s only 15 years old. As the recent Lilo & Stitch proved, there’s plenty box office gold to mine from introducing new children to a young and beloved property, while banking on the nostalgia that a generation without fully formed frontal lobes would carry for the not-so-distant animated films and TV spinoffs they were weaned on.
