Little has been said so far about How To Train Your Dragon 3, which is due to hit theaters in July 2016.
Dean DeBlois, writer and director, discussed the film recently.
“When I was approached about a sequel, I said will you consider it to be the middle act of a three act trilogy? Therefore we’re not just inventing a random other adventure that you cast the same 5 or 6 characters into and graft on a problem that feels artificial. So by meeting Hiccup at this later stage of his life he’s now dealing with an organic and universal problem that many of us go through at that stage. But it is the middle chapter heading toward the culmination of Hiccup’s final coming of age,” he said, reported Slash Film.
“And the intention is to be very conscious of where we came from in the first movie and where we’re heading in the third. So I’ve been working on a running outline for sometime and I know we’re going to get to the point where Cressida Cowell books start which is Hiccup, as an adult, looking back on his life and saying ‘There were dragons when I was a boy.’
“There’s something really powerful and emotional about that that hits you in the gut. And I think it could be bittersweet and beautiful. But how they disappear? What happened and what leads them to that point? That’s the stuff of the third movie. We’re always very conscious to make sure the threads we’re pulling forward are from the first film and paying off in the second are also embedding storylines for the third.”
There’s also been rumblings about a potential How to Train Your Dragon 4.
John Powell, composer of the trilogy, told Collider:
“I saw Dean in Cannes, we had a premiere of the film there, and he was very merry and a bit drunk and he sort of knew about [How to Train Your Dragon] 3 and I think it was mentioned to him by Jeffrey [Katzenberg] that maybe they would do 4. And that was definitely, I think, a real kind of eye-opener for Dean and for me because it’s like, ‘Hey I thought this was a trilogy?’ (laughs). So I don’t know, and it might be good because he’s got a lot of story left to tell, so maybe splitting it into two will work, but I just don’t know about that yet. I’m supposing that at the moment, Dean has an idea for the third one and he isn’t telling any of us yet.”
Jeffrey Katezenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation, discussed extending the series back in 2010.
“Kung Fu Panda actually has 6 chapters to it, and we’ve mapped that out over the years. How To Train Your Dragon is at least three: maybe more, but we know there are a least three chapters to that story,” he said. “There are actually 8 books… right now, today, we know that there are three for sure that we want to tell and there may be more. We haven’t thought, you know, how do we continue beyond that.”
How to Train Your Dragon 2 will hit theaters on June 13.
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