In How to Train Your Dragon (2025), Hiccup and Toothless destroy the giant dragon, Hiccup loses part of a leg, and Berk and the dragons end up living together.
The giant dragon dies when Hiccup and Toothless lure it into the sky and set it ablaze, and it crashes into the volcano and explodes. The kill is a team effort in the air: Toothless provides the flight and the fire, and Hiccup provides the plan, which mirrors the harness and replacement tail fin he built earlier so the two could fly at all. Hiccup wakes up after losing part of his leg, and Toothless gets a matching prosthetic fin. In my opinion the matched pair is the film's quietest and best idea: the boy who built the dragon a replacement tail fin is now the one living with a loss of his own, so each is repaying the other.
Stoick has reconciled with his son, and Hiccup is now respected in the village. That is the payoff for the exam scene, where Stoick disowned him after Hiccup refused to kill a captive dragon, and for the fleet sequence, where Stoick forced Toothless to lead the way to the nest. Gerard Butler plays that turn without a speech about forgiveness; the change shows in how the village treats Hiccup afterward. Astrid and Hiccup begin a romance, which grows out of the flight scene where she first accepts Toothless.
The film closes with dragons living alongside the villagers. The ending is deliberately complete, because it answers the question the opening raids ask, which is how a village that fights dragons every week could ever stop. The nest also explains the whole war: the gigantic dragon forced the smaller ones to feed it, so the raids were never simple aggression, and killing it removes the cause rather than winning a battle.
As a retelling of How to Train Your Dragon (2010), the ending is built to stand alone for new viewers, and it fits the faithful approach that DeBlois, a co-director of the 2010 film and now director, writer and producer here, brought to the remake. In release order the film comes after How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019), so it restarts the story rather than continuing it. The question of what comes next is picked up by How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2027), which Universal scheduled for June 11, 2027.
