‘How To Train Your Dragon 3’ Director Dean DeBlois Says ‘We’re Gonna Take The Story Where The Books Begin’
Although Dreamworks Animation has had its setbacks, what with the company cutting 500 jobs and shutting down PDI Studio, but some things are continuing as planned, including the sequel to the critically acclaimed How to Train Your Dragon 2. Despite the fact that the film didn’t perform quite as well as most were hoping — and, in fact, performed worse domestically than the first How To Train Your Dragon flick — the film did perfectly well enough to make a decent profit and warrant a third and final installment in the trilogy.
In the years before the release of an animated film, things are usually mostly quiet, but the folks over at Collider attended the Visual Effects Society Awards, and were able to snag a quick interview with Dean DeBlois, director of the first two films as well as the upcoming How to Train Your Dragon 3.
“[‘How To Train Your Dragon 3’ is] the culmination of Hiccup’s coming of age. Both he and Toothless are now chiefs of their respective tribes, and it’s a dueling story where you have both characters trying to do what’s right for their kind, and an eventual outcome where Hiccup is able to stand on his own. We’re gonna take the story to where the books begin, which is Hiccup as an adult reflecting back on a time where there were dragons, suggesting that the dragons will in some way go away. Why and could they come back and the mystery of what all that is will be saved for the actual story.”
That sounds like quite the ambitious third act. It also seems like a story that may have an impending tragedy at its conclusion. Just how will the dragons go away without something terrible or sad happening? How to Train Your Dragon fans will have to cross their fingers so that Toothless will come out of the third film unscathed.
That wasn’t all DeBlois had to say about the movie. The director even spoke on the ambiguous fate of Drago, the main villain in How to Train Your Dragon 2.
“You have to wait until the third film to actually see where Drago’s character goes. He’s a lot more complex than he’s presented in this second installment.”
An interesting tidbit, and it is further proof of some of the mature places these films go, proving to kids that not all bad guys are fully bad, and that there are plenty different shades in-between good and evil.
How To Train Your Dragon 3 is set for a release on June 29, 2018, so there’s a lot of time between then and now. But that’s not to say Delois isn’t hard at work on the movie.
“There were a few months of pitching outlines and making sure that everybody was content with where it was headed, and now I’m deep into the script. I’m about halfway through. I was literally working on it this afternoon before coming here. I have to hand it off pretty soon.”
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