How to Train Your Dragon 2

Theatrical Release Poster

***How to Train Your Dragon 2*** is a 2014 American 3D computer-animated action fantasy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by 20th Century Fox, loosely based on the British book series of the same name by Cressida Cowell. It is the sequel to the 2010 computer-animated film *How to Train Your Dragon* and the second installment in the trilogy. The film is written and directed by Dean DeBlois, and stars the voices of Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig, with the addition of Cate Blanchett, Djimon Hounsou, and Kit Harington. The film takes place five years after the first film, featuring Hiccup and his friends as young adults as they meet Valka, Hiccup's long-lost mother, and Drago Bludvist, a madman who wants to conquer the world.

DeBlois, who co-directed the first film, agreed to return to direct the second film on the condition that he would be allowed to turn it into a trilogy. He cited *The Empire Strikes Back* and *My Neighbor Totoro* as his main inspirations, with the expanded scope of *The Empire Strikes Back* being particularly influential. The entire voice cast from the first film returned, and Cate Blanchett and Djimon Hounsou signed on to voice Valka and Drago, respectively. DeBlois and his creative team visited Norway and Svalbard to give them ideas for the setting. Composer John Powell returned to score the film. *How to Train Your Dragon 2* benefited from advances in animation technology and was DreamWorks' first film to use scalable multicore processing and the studio's new animation and lighting software.

The film was released on June 13, 2014, and like its predecessor, received wide acclaim. Critics praised the film for its animation, voice acting, musical score, action sequences, emotional depth, and darker, more serious tone compared to its predecessor. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The film won six Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature. The film grossed over $621 million worldwide, making it the 13th-highest-grossing film of 2014. It earned less than its predecessor at the US box office, but performed better internationally. The third and final installment in the trilogy, *How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World*, was released on February 22, 2019.

## Plot

Five years after the Viking village of Berk and the dragons made peace, they now live together in harmony. Hiccup goes on adventures with his dragon, Toothless, as they discover and map unexplored lands. Now 20 years old, he is being pressed by his father, Stoick the Vast, to succeed him as chieftain, although Hiccup remains unsure if he is ready for this responsibility.

While investigating a burnt forest, Hiccup and Astrid discover the remains of a fort encased in ice and meet a group of dragon trappers led by Eret, who blames them for his fort's destruction and attempts to capture their dragons for an insane conqueror named Drago Bludvist. The two dragon riders escape and return to Berk to warn Stoick about the dragon army that Drago is amassing. Stoick orders the villagers to fortify the island and prepare for battle. Hiccup, however, refuses to believe that war is inevitable. After Stoick interrupts Hiccup's plan to get Eret to take him to Drago, Stoick explains that he once met Drago at a gathering of chiefs, where Drago, mocked after offering the chiefs his service in return for their servitude, murdered them all using armored dragons, with Stoick as the only survivor. Undeterred, Hiccup flies off with Toothless in search of Drago to try to reason with him.

They run into a dragon rider named Valka, who is revealed to be Hiccup's long-lost mother. She explains that she, like her son, could not bring herself to kill dragons. After being carried off during a dragon raid, she spent 20 years rescuing dragons from Drago's traps and bringing them to an island nest created out of ice by a gigantic Alpha dragon called a "Bewilderbeast", which is able to control smaller dragons. Stoick tracks Hiccup to the nest, where he discovers that his wife is still alive. Meanwhile, Astrid and the other riders kidnap Eret to find Drago, but Drago captures them and learns of Berk's dragons.

Drago and his armada lay siege to the nest, where he reveals that he has his own Bewilderbeast to challenge the Alpha. A battle ensues between the two colossal dragons, which ends with Drago's Bewilderbeast killing its opponent and becoming the new Alpha. Drago's Bewilderbeast then seizes control of all the adult dragons, which hypnotically obey. Hiccup tries to persuade Drago to end the violence, but Drago orders him killed. Toothless, under the Bewilderbeast's influence, approaches Hiccup and launches a blast, but Stoick pushes Hiccup out of the way and is hit instead, dying as a result. The Bewilderbeast momentarily relinquishes control of Toothless, but Hiccup drives him away in a fit of despair. Drago maroons Hiccup and the others on the island and rides Toothless, again under the control of the Bewilderbeast, to lead his army to conquer Berk. Stoick is given a Viking funeral and Hiccup, now having lost both his father and dragon, is unsure what to do. Valka encourages him by telling him that he alone can unite humans and dragons, and inspired by her words and his father's, Hiccup decides to return to Berk to stop Drago.

The dragon riders fly baby dragons back to Berk, as they are immune to the Bewilderbeast's control. They find that Drago has already attacked the village and taken control of its dragons. Hiccup confronts Drago and a brainwashed Toothless while the other riders work to distract the Bewilderbeast. Hiccup succeeds in freeing Toothless from the Bewilderbeast's control, much to Drago's surprise. Hiccup and Toothless briefly separate Drago from the Bewilderbeast and confront Drago on the ground, but the Bewilderbeast attacks them, encasing them in ice. However, Toothless blasts away the ice, revealing that both Hiccup and he are unharmed. He then challenges the Bewilderbeast, shooting it in the face repeatedly, which breaks its control over the other dragons, who side with Toothless as the new Alpha dragon. All the dragons repeatedly fire at the Bewilderbeast until Toothless fires a final massive blast, breaking its left tusk. Defeated, the Bewilderbeast retreats under the sea with Drago on its back. The Vikings and dragons celebrate their victory and Hiccup is made chieftain of Berk.

Afterwards, Berk undergoes repairs while feeling secure knowing that its dragons can defend it.

## Cast

* Jay Baruchel as Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, the son of the Viking chief Stoick the Vast and Valka.
* Cate Blanchett as Valka, Stoick's wife, Hiccup's long-lost mother and a dragon rescuer who spent 20 years living and rescuing Dragons after she was carried off by a Stormcutter.
* Gerard Butler as Stoick the Vast, chieftain of the Viking tribe of Berk, Hiccup's father and Valka's husband.
* Craig Ferguson as Gobber the Belch, Stoick's closest friend and a seasoned warrior.
* America Ferrera as Astrid Hofferson, Hiccup's girlfriend.
* Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fishlegs Ingerman.
* Jonah Hill as Snotlout Jorgenson.
* T. J. Miller and Kristen Wiig as Tuffnut and Ruffnut Thorston, fraternal twins.
* Djimon Hounsou as Drago Bludvist, a ruthless warlord and dragon hunter who seeks to take over the world with a dragon army. He has a prosthetic left arm, since he lost his real arm during an earlier encounter with dragons, and wears a dragon-hide cape immune to dragon-fire attacks.
* Kit Harington as Eret, a dragon trapper who sells captured dragons to Drago. He sports a scar on his chest given to him by Drago following the last time he showed up with no dragons.

### ADR Group

* Newell Alexander
* Steve Alterman
* Steve Apostolina
* Julian Barnes
* Mitch Carter
* Wendy Cutler
* Robert Pike Daniel
* Neil Dickson
* Alastair Duncan
* Jean Gilpin
* Nicholas Guest
* Endre Hules
* Rif Hutton
* Bjørn Johnson
* Peter Lavin
* Edie Mirman
* Oliver Muirhead
* Paula Jane Newman
* Jim Pirri
* Alan Shearman
* Julian Stone
* John Hans Tester
* Matthew Wolf

## Production

### Development

After the success of the first film, the sequel was announced on April 27, 2010. "*How to Train Your Dragon* … has become DreamWorks Animation's next franchise. We plan to release the sequel theatrically in 2013," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation's CEO. It was later revealed that DeBlois had started drafting the outline for a sequel in February 2010 at Skywalker Ranch, during the final sound mix of the first film. The film was originally scheduled for release on June 20, 2014, but in August 2013 the release date was moved forward one week to June 13, 2014.

The film was written, directed, and executive produced by Dean DeBlois, the co-writer/co-director of the first film. Bonnie Arnold, the producer of the first film, also returned, while Chris Sanders, who co-directed and co-wrote the first film, acted only as an additional executive producer this time due to his involvement with *The Croods*. When offered the sequel, DeBlois accepted it on condition he can turn it into a trilogy. For the sequel, he intended to revisit the films of his youth, with *The Empire Strikes Back* and *My Neighbor Totoro* having the pivotal inspirations for the film. "What I loved especially about *Empire* is that it expanded *Star Wars* in every direction: emotionally, its scope, characters, fun. It felt like an embellishment and that's the goal."

The entire original voice cast—Baruchel, Butler, Ferguson, Ferrera, Hill, Mintz-Plasse, Miller, and Wiig—returned for the sequel. On June 19, 2012, it was announced that Kit Harington, of *Game of Thrones* fame, was cast as one of the film's antagonists. At the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con International, it was announced that Cate Blanchett and Djimon Hounsou had joined the cast; they lent their voices to Valka and Drago Bludvist, respectively.

While the first film was set in a generic North Sea environment, the creative team decided to focus on Norway this time around. Early in the sequel's development, about a dozen of them traveled there for a week-long research trip, where they toured Oslo, Bergen, and the fjords. DeBlois, together with Gregg Taylor (DreamWorks' head of feature development) and Roger Deakins (a cinematographer who served as visual consultant), then broke off from the group to visit Svalbard and see polar bears in the wild with the assistance of armed guides.

DeBlois explained that he had learned from directing *Lilo and Stitch* (2002) that "if you set an animated film in a place you want to visit, there's a chance you might get to go there." He had wanted to visit Svalbard for some time, after learning of its stark beauty from a couple of backpackers he met during earlier visits to Iceland to work with post-rock band Sigur Rós on the 2007 documentary film *Heima*.

### Animation

Over the five years before the film's release, DreamWorks Animation had substantially over-hauled its production workflow and animation software. *How to Train Your Dragon 2* was the first DreamWorks Animation film that used "scalable multicore processing", developed together with Hewlett-Packard. Called by Katzenberg as "the next revolution in filmmaking", it enabled artists for the first time to work on rich, complex images in real time, instead of waiting eight hours to see the results the next day. The film was also the studio's first film to use its new animation and lighting software through the entire production. Programs named *Premo* and *Torch* allowed much more subtlety, improving facial animation and enabling "the sense of fat, jiggle, loose skin, the sensation of skin moving over muscle instead of masses moving together."

By the time production was complete, over 500 people had worked on the film at DreamWorks Animation's headquarters in Glendale, as well as its branch offices at PDI/DreamWorks in Redwood City and DreamWorks India in Bangalore.

## Release

The film was screened out of competition on May 16, 2014 at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. In the United States, the film premiered on June 8, 2014, at the Regency Village Theater in Los Angeles, and was theatrically released on June 13, 2014. The film was also digitally remastered into IMAX 3D and released to international theaters on June 13, 2014.

### Home media

*How to Train Your Dragon 2* was released digitally on October 21, 2014, and was released on DVD and Blu-ray on November 11, 2014. The Blu-ray combo pack and digital release is accompanied by a new animated short film *Dawn of the Dragon Racers*, in which Hiccup and friends compete to become the first Dragon Racing Champion of Berk. A double DVD pack with the film and *Dawn of the Dragon Racers* was released exclusively at Walmart stores. As of February 2015, 7.5 million home entertainment units have been sold worldwide.

## Reception

### Critical response

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a "certified fresh" score of 91% based on reviews from 170 critics, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website's critical consensus states: "Exciting, emotionally resonant, and beautifully animated, *How to Train Your Dragon 2* builds on its predecessor's successes just the way a sequel should." Metacritic gave the film a score of 76/100 based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore during the opening weekend gave the film a grade A. Audiences were a mix of 47% female and 53% male. Children and Young Adults responded most strongly, with those aged under 25 giving a grade A+.

### Box office

*How to Train Your Dragon 2* grossed $177 million in North America, and $441.9 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $618.9 million. The film is the second-highest-grossing animated film of 2014, behind *Big Hero 6*, and the thirteenth-highest-grossing film of the year in any genre. While *How to Train Your Dragon 2* only earned $177 million at the US box office, compared to $217 million for its predecessor, it performed much better at the international box office, earning $438 million to *How to Train Your Dragon*'s $277 million. Calculating in all expenses, *Deadline Hollywood* estimated that the film made a profit of $107.3 million.

In the United States and Canada, the film earned $18.5 million on its opening day, and opened at number two in its first weekend, with $49,451,322. In its second weekend, the film dropped to number three, grossing an additional $24,719,312. In its third weekend, the film stayed at number three, grossing $13,237,697. In its fourth weekend, the film dropped to number five, grossing $8,961,088.

Its $25.9 million opening weekend in China was the biggest-ever for an animated film in the country, surpassing the record previously held by *Kung Fu Panda 2.*

## Soundtrack

*Main article: How to Train Your Dragon 2/Soundtrack*
## Video game

*Main article: How to Train Your Dragon 2 (video game)*
A video game based on the film, titled *How to Train Your Dragon 2*, was released in June 2014 by Little Orbit. Developed by Torus Games, the game is available for Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, Wii U, and PlayStation 3. It allows players to choose various riders and dragons, and enter a dragon flight school, participating in trainings, challenges, and tournaments.

## Sequel

*Main article: How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World*
The third and final film, titled *How to Train Your Dragon 3*, was originally scheduled for release on June 17, 2016, but in September 2014, DreamWorks Animation moved the release date to June 9, 2017. In January 2015, in the wake of the closure of Pacific Data Images and massive lay-offs, the release date was initially pushed back to June 29, 2018, but subsequently was brought forward to May 18, 2018. On December 5, 2016, the release date was pushed back again to March 1, 2019. Dean DeBlois, the co-screenwriter/co-director of the first and writer-director of the second film, will return, along with producer Bonnie Arnold and all the main cast, while composer John Powell, who scored the first two films, will also be returning. Cate Blanchett, Kit Harington, and Djimon Hounsou will also reprise their roles as Valka, Eret, and Drago, respectively, from the second film. F. Murray Abraham had joined the cast as the film’s main villain, named Grimmel.

## Notes

1. ↑ On February 2, 2018, the film's distribution rights were purchased by DreamWorks Animation from 20th Century Fox and transferred to Universal Pictures.