How to Train Your Dragon Director Explains What Makes the Live-Action Version Different
The director of the animated How to Train Your Dragon movies is remaking his beloved film in a new medium and he explains why.
With this week's release of the full trailer for the live-action version of DreamWork's How to Train Your Dragon, audiences finally get to see how this take on the beloved animated film franchise brings to life the infamous Isle of Berk, young Hiccup Haddock III (Mason Thames) and Toothless the Night Fury dragon.
Whether your heart belongs to the animated trilogy or you're beyond excited to see Berk realized in live-action, both are coming from the sincere storytelling source of writer/director/executive producer Dean DeBlois.
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In 2010, DeBlois and Chris Sanders (The Wild Robot) co-directed the DreamWorks Animation adaptation of Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon book. Fifteen years later, DeBlois is helming this live-action version and plenty are wondering why he's come back to revisit the characters and stories outside of animation?
At a recent special media preview of the new trailer, NBC Insider got to hear it straight from DeBlois who revealed what it was that persuaded him to return to this world, including a bigger story for Astrid Hofferson (Nico Parker), and getting to restore some elements he didn't get to keep in the first animated film.
How To Train Your Dragon Director on Going Live-Action
Addressing the elephant in the room, DeBlois opened by telling the invited media, "I have not been the biggest fan of live-action movies that have been made of animated films. Sometimes, because I feel like they're made to replace the animated movie. So, from the start, we wanted to make sure that that wasn't our intention here. If we were going to do this in live action, we wanted to find a reason for being."
Back when the original animated film was in production, DeBlois said that, due to the truncated production schedule and limited resource they had to make it, they had to skip over some wanted character development, relationship scenes and action sequences.
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"I am very proud of of all three movies, so never to disparage the wonderful work that went into it, that myself, Chris Sanders and the entire animation crew put into it," he clarified. "But here is another presentation of that story. It's a reimagining that holds quite faithful to the story and yet finds moments where we could enrich character relationships, give a bit of depth, give a little bit of mythology that might have been lacking in that original. It's all in hopes to make it feel like it enriches the experience and it gives you that much more emotional connection to the characters and a sense of being, and a sense of established folklore to this world."
He said a way to look at this live-action film is to think of the animated How to Train Your Dragon as a "test preview screening" and they still have money and time to add things. This film includes the improvements that they couldn't make 15-years ago.
"Executing it in live action, we're hoping to bring all of the strengths of that medium to this story. Whether or not we succeed, the world can judge but that was the intention. There's a lot of love, a lot of affection, a lot of care and attention that we've sunk into all of these aspects," he explained.
See for yourself when How to Train Your Dragon opens exclusively in theaters on June 13, 2025.
