'Dragon' sequel hopes to soar like original movie

At Cannes this year, there seemed to be an awful lot riding on How to Train Your Dragon 2. The sequel to 2010's surprise animation hit, about a young Viking who befriends a dragon named Toothless, it arrived weighed down with expectations.

Never mind measuring up to the high bar set by its predecessor - this follow-up is seen as a must-hit movie for DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind it.

Under-performing DreamWorks titles of the past few years, such as Mr Peabody & Sherman (2014), Turbo (2013) and Rise of the Guardians (2012), all fell well short of the US$494 million that How to Train Your Dragon raked in three years ago. Compare that with the numbers racked up by Disney princess toon Frozen last year: US$1.24 billion. Still, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg must be feeling quietly confident: early reviews have been blazing, with trade paper Variety proclaiming it the studio's "strongest sequel yet".

Furthermore, How to Train Your Dragon already comes with a huge following, thanks to the dozen books written by Cressida Cowell that have inspired the films. In between the first and second films, the creators smartly put together a Cartoon Network TV series, DreamWorks Dragons, bridging the two movies and explaining just how Vikings and dragons learned to co-exist. And, lest we forget, with the enormous rise in popularity of the adult HBO series, Game of Thrones, fire-breathing beasties are very in right now.

"I know for a fact that How to Train Your Dragon was a lot of kids' favourite movie of all time, and they watch it every single day," says Jay Baruchel, who voices Hiccup. "But I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams expected that it was going to be a global phenomenon. That's just not an option, right? So had there only been the first movie, that would still be massive beyond our wildest dreams. Man, we lucked out. You can spend your entire career and never be part of something half as impactful as these movies. I feel like I got to stumble into our Star Wars."

Much of this can be attributed to Dean DeBlois, the Canadian-born filmmaker who went solo on How to Train Your Dragon 2 after co-writing and directing its predecessor with Chris Sanders, with whom he also made 2002's Lilo & Stitch. "When How to Train Your Dragon became a success, Jeffrey came to me and said, 'OK, I need ideas for a sequel,'" recalls DeBlois. With Sanders then working on prehistoric cartoon The Croods, it left DeBlois with carte blanche to take the franchise where he wanted.

While previous DreamWorks sequels were hardly groundbreaking - think of the Shrek franchise, for example - the 44-year-old DeBlois had ambitions. "I told [Katzenberg] I was keen on it if he would consider it being a trilogy. So it doesn't feel like an arbitrary random next adventure with the same five or six characters. It's now a seemingly necessary evolution in Hiccup's coming of age, and so by re-introducing him five years later, we get to see him at a different period in his life."

When Katzenberg agreed, DeBlois set to work crafting a story arc that appealed to both "the 10-year-old in me and the 44-year-old in me"; his immediate model was The Empire Strikes Back, the 1980 sequel to George Lucas' touchstone sci-fi Star Wars which both expanded its galaxy, geographically speaking, and homed in on some major personal issues. In the case of How to Train Your Dragon 2, Hiccup is no longer the socially awkward soul he was in the original film; now, he's on a much wider journey than simply taming a dragon.