Directors remaking their own movies is part of a long and storied tradition in Hollywood. Hitchcock remade his classic suspense film The Man Who Knew Too Much with a glitzy Hollywood budget and cast. Olivier Assayas recently turned his film Irma Vep into a TV series. And famously, Michael Haneke directed an English shot-for-shot remake of his disturbing 1997 Austrian thriller Funny Games. But Dean Deblois, who helmed the acclaimed animated fantasy trilogy How to Train Your Dragon, may be the first to take his remake across mediums. And he does it in the midst of a creative and cultural tipping point for the Hollywood remake machine: do we really need another live-action remake of a beloved animated classic?
The new How to Train Your Dragon doesn’t quite have the answer to that question, but it does offer an interesting alternative to the string of half-baked Disney live-action remakes that lose the magic of the original by veering too hard into reality: what if the new remake was literally just the original, but in live-action?
