The 2025 live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon is now available for digital purchase and viewing, and it’s coming to DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K on Aug. 12, with an array of behind-the-scenes features and commentary — and with two deleted scenes that parallel sequences from the original 2010 animated version of the movie. Dean DeBlois, who co-directed the 2010 version and went solo on helming the 2025 remake, told Polygon in an exclusive interview that it was “evident” he needed to cut these two sequences, even though he regretted what he had to lose in the process.
“We shot them, so we had every intention of having them in the movie!” he said. “But it’s just part of the alchemy of editing. You sit there and you piece it together. Everything’s sort of long-winded at first, and then you squeeze and you squeeze, and it eventually starts to paint targets on areas of the movie where you really feel the breaks being hit.”
Image: DreamWorks Animation
The first scene features weedy Viking protagonist Hiccup (Mason Thames) smuggling Toothless, the sinuous black dragon he’s befriended, back through his village and into his home, and nearly being caught by his crush object and rival Astrid (Nico Parker), his village’s most skilled, capable up-and-coming teen warrior. There’s a lot of fumbling around and physical comedy as he tries to excuse the noises Toothless makes, and block any sight of the dragon with his body.
“Just having Astrid almost catch Hiccup red-handed with Toothless in a stall was another bit of fun tension between the two of them, and I thought they played it really well,” DeBlois said.
The other deleted scene has Toothless fending off a group of Terrible Terrors — colorful, iguana-sized fire-breathing mini-dragons — who try to poach some of his dinner, as Hiccup watches. The small dragons seem immune to each other’s fire blasts, but when Toothless casually defends his fish by shooting his own breath-weapon down one Terror’s throat, it immediately collapses, teaching Hiccup an important lesson about dragon anatomy. When he feeds the Terror himself, it curls up next to him like a cat, and he realizes once again that everything his people think they know about dragons is wrong.
DeBlois found the scene “charming,” but as he says on the home-video commentary on that deleted scene, he also felt it was redundant with previous lessons where Hiccup also says everything he knows about dragons is wrong.
“All of those things were good for the story,” DeBlois told Polygon. “So it was a pain to lose both of those. But I also recognized that there’s an old adage: “When in doubt, cut it out.” As soon as we did it, it was like, ‘OK, you feel the weight being lifted, and therefore it’s the right decision.’”
In spite of the cut scenes, the live-action How to Train Your Dragon is longer than the original animated version, 125 minutes instead of a zippy 98 minutes. DeBlois explores why in the behind-the-scenes features: The live-action movie gives Hiccup more flying time, and lets the otherwise very similar scenes play out in more human detail, rather than with the shorthanded, choppier editing of an animated feature. But that meant that in editing, it became clear that the live-action version could use some trimming.
“Those were two spots where we thought ‘Narratively, we can get by without them.’” DeBlois told Polygon. “And just by simply snipping and removing them, everything breezed through so that the pace took on a natural flow. That it made it evident that they had to go.”
