Mason Thames and Nico Parker to star as Hiccup and Astrid in How to Train Your Dragon! Thames is best known for Black Telephone as well as appearances on Walker and For All Mankind . Parker, on the other hand, portrayed Sarah Miller in the series premiere episode of HBO’s The Last of Us , and also starred in Dumbo and Day Three .
The live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon will be written, directed and produced by Dean DeBlois, who will make his debut after much of the helm of the animated series. Marc Platt, who worked on Legally Blonde and the upcoming movie Wicked, will be producing. Production is slated to start this summer.
This will be the first time a DreamWorks animated series has been transferred to live-action action. The How to Train Your Dragon series , based on the books by Cressida Cowell, spanned three films from 2010 to 2019, starring Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, America Ferrera, and Craig Ferguson. It also led to numerous short films and TV spin-offs, including DreamWorks Dragons, DreamWorks Dragons: Rescue Rider , and DreamWorks Dragons: The Nine Realms.
Will there be a How to Train Your Dragon reboot ?
As DeBlois explained in 2019, the ideal way to continue the series in animation would be to set it in a completely different era.
We definitely wanted [the ending] to be hopeful but also conclusive. I think what we were trying to do was provide a satisfying ending that ultimately meant Hiccup and Toothless would go their separate ways, but also reassure the audience that it was for the best that we saw them grow up. For me, it’s a satisfying ending, and that was the intention to really bring the dragons back and make them legendary, but we viewers know they’re still around. I don’t own the series, so I think if Dreamworks wanted to re-create it at some point, I’d hope it would be a different timeline, different characters, and the story of Hiccup or Toothless would be intact.
The US release date for How to Train Your Dragon is March 14, 2025.
