When director Dean DeBlois agreed to make a live-action version of his 2010 DreamWorks Animation hit How to Train Your Dragon (co-directed with Chris Sanders), he faced criticism from the start — including from his own past words. He’d publicly said in the past that he’d skipped watching live-action remakes of animated movies. “I’m not interested in them,” he said during an Annecy International Animation Film Festival event in 2020. “I just think that it’s lazy on the part of the studio.”
In promotional interviews around his 2025 How to Train Your Dragon remake, DeBlois has been frank about how when Universal Pictures president Peter Cramer told him the studio was planning a remake, he asked to direct it not out of enthusiasm, but out of concern over how another director might interfere with the version of the story he and Sanders put on screen. “I [realized] that if I don’t do it, someone else is going to do it, and I don’t want to see somebody else’s version of it,” he said during a promotional tour. “I’m too protective of the world and the characters.”
So when did his reluctance shift to the full-on enthusiasm for the project he’s shown ever since?
“I think it was the moment that I had the conversation with John Powell,” DeBlois told Polygon in an exclusive interview tied to the new movie’s digital home release. Powell composed the music for the original How to Train Your Dragon and its two animated movie sequels, also directed by DeBlois.
“I called him right after I got off the phone with the studio, and I said, ‘Please talk me out of this if you think it’s a bad idea.’” DeBlois told Polygon. “But he immediately went toward the gold, which was what I had been thinking about: If we do it with love, and if we do it with respect for the fan base, and with our shared dislike of remakes, we might be able to be truly additive. We might be able to bring something that is faithful to its source, and yet does mine a few opportunities to go deeper with mythology, or character, or the immersion of the action.”
DeBlois says Powell told him, “‘If we do it right, it’ll be a hug, like a nostalgic hug to the existing fan base. It’ll open it up for a whole new generation, and others who just don’t watch animation. And if you’re in, I’m in.’ And so I felt that confidence, just knowing that John doesn’t pull punches. He’s just very honest and blunt about the things he likes and doesn’t like. I felt if he felt the potential, then so did I.”
The new movie’s success likely comes from different sources. There’s a built-in market for remakes of kids’ movies, as people who grew up loving an original revisit it with their kids. There’s an ongoing hunger for kid-safe entertainment in movie theaters. But in part, as DeBlois acknowledges himself, some people just don’t watch animated shows or movies, because of the American prejudice that cartoons are kids’ stuff. So some people who’ve seen his live-action version of the story were watching it for the first time.
“People who haven’t seen the original, I think, respond in the way that people who had seen the original do,” he said. “It’s a tight little story that is a crowd-pleaser. It takes you on a journey of tears and thrills and warmth at the end. That was always our intention, to try to channel our love of ’80s movies onto the screen. It doesn’t go too dark. It doesn’t ever feel too heavy or sentimental. It just earns its moments. And I think you get that in the live-action version as much as you do in the animation. So if it happens to be that you enter the world of How to Train Your Dragon through the live-action movie, then hopefully it steers you toward the animated movies and the books. That’d be great.”