Universal’s eagerly awaited live-action remake of DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon may not have even hit cinemas just yet, but that hasn’t stopped director Dean DeBlois and his team from flying into production on its sequel already. Following a very warmly received screening of Hiccup and Toothless’ first foray into live-action at CinemaCon yesterday, DeBlois took to the stage with stars Nico Parker (Astrid) and Gerard Butler (Stoick) to confirm that a drawn-to-live remake of How To Train Your Dragon 2 is getting ready to take flight in cinemas worldwide on 11 June, 2027.
DeBlois will be back in the director’s hotseat for the sequel, with Butler and Parker returning alongside Mason Thames as unlikely Viking hero Hiccup. Whether How To Train Your Dragon 2‘s new characters — namely Hiccup’s estranged mother Valka (Cate Blanchett), Eret (Kit Harington), and Drago (Djimon Hounsou) — will be reintroduced with their original actors à la Butler’s Stoick or given fresh faces remains to be seen, but given the confidence Universal has placed in their live-action take on the franchise thus far, we certainly wouldn’t bet against DeBlois bringing out the big guns as Hiccup and Toothless’ Viking-dragon utopia comes under threat from the properly menacing, aforementioned dragon subjugator Drago.
DeBlois has long spoken about seeing his second time around with How To Train Your Dragon as a chance to push beyond he and his team’s already mightily impressive work on the animated movies (“Chris Sanders and I were brought in as a replacement writer and director team on that first film […] and many of our ambitions had to be tabled as we were racing to the finish,” the director revealed to Empire when we spoke back in February). And so, while a live-action remake of an animated sequel is virtually unheard of, even in this modern era of reboots/legacy sequels/requels, the early buzz for the first How To Train Your Dragon reimagining — due out on 13 June — and the presence of DeBlois at the helm of its sequel has us quietly hopeful that the only hiccups to be expected here are of the Horrendous Haddock III variety. See you in Berk, folks!
