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Dean DeBlois at the ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ Los Angeles Premiere held at the Academy Museum of … More Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California. Variety via Getty Images “Gerard Butler coming back was a given from the start. However, I was told he was unavailable,” recalls Dean DeBlois, writer-director of the live-action remake How to Train Your Dragon. “He had back-to-back projects, so he could not be considered for the role of Stoik the Vast, which was bizarre, disorientating, and heartbreaking.” “Then the actor’s strike happened in 2023, and that moved a bunch of projects around, so suddenly Gerard was available, coming out of that strike, for a short window where he could join us. He wanted to do it, and he had the opportunity. I can’t imagine the movie without Gerard, but there was a time when we were being forced to consider a movie without him.” DeBlois, who also helmed the original animated trilogy that grossed over $1.64 billion at the worldwide box office, and Butler aren’t the only ones returning for the reimaging. The composer of the original’s music is also back on board, another key part of the writer-director’s vision for the reboot that came as “a complete surprise.” “I thought I had put these characters in this world to bed with the third Dragon film. I was working on other, very diverse projects, writing those scripts, setting up the projects at different studios, and then I got the phone call for this, totally out of the blue,” the writer-director recalls. “My immediate instinct was that I didn’t want to see someone else’s version of this. There’s a way into this where we could embellish those things that were a little shortchanged in the animated film and lean into the bells and whistles that…

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Filed under: News - @ June 12, 2025 11:28 pm