Massive creatures with scales have become the focus of Empire‘s 2025 Preview as the entertainment magazine debuts new looks at Jurassic World Rebirth and Dean DeBlois’ live-action adaptation of How to Train Your Dragon. DeBlois, who directed all three of Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon films, is partnering with co-director Chris Sanders for the anticipated project. Bringing Hiccup and Toothless’ tale to live-action gives DeBlois a chance to share the fantasy epic with audiences with a new dimension, emotionality, and action. “It’s so dialled-up in terms of stakes — having a fully credible, photo-real dragon stomping around trying to kill him,” DeBlois told Empire regarding the film’s central dragon, Toothless, interacting with Hiccup, played by Mason Thames (The Black Phone).

In How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup discovers dragons aren’t as terrifying as the stories would have him believe. Hiccup is an outsider, so people will likely brush his opinions aside. Still, when he proves to them that dragons are misunderstood and potentially friendly, he ushers in a new era where Vikings and dragons work together to build a shared society. “There was a bit of awkwardness, but also a vulnerability to him which [came] with the fact that he was 15 when we were auditioning him,” says DeBlois about Thames landing the role.

In the new photo for How to Train Your Dragon, we find Thames’s Hiccup in an arena and battle-ready. As the eager crowd looks down from above, Hiccup braces himself for a questionable outcome to the confrontation.

In contrast, Empire debuted a new image of Scarlett Johansson in Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth, a dinosaur action-adventure film set five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion. In Jurassic World Rebirth, an expedition into isolated equatorial regions to extract DNA from three prehistoric creatures goes awry. Are you remotely surprised? This sort of nonsense happens every time. When will humans learn and leave the dinosaurs alone? Probably never.

Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett carries a massive gun through thick foliage in the new Jurassic World Rebirth photo. The weapon appears to have a giant needle at its tip, seemingly to extract the DNA. I don’t know about you, but you wouldn’t catch my slow-moving ass trying to poke a dinosaur with a giant syringe. Miracle cure or not, humanity can fend for itself.

What do you think about today’s new looks at How to Train Your Dragon and Jurassic World Rebirth? Would you stab a dinosaur’s scaly exterior with that needle gun? Let us know in the comments section below, and be honest.

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