In the first two How To Train Your Dragon films Gerard Butler (300, London Has Fallen, Geostorm) played Stoick The Vast, Hiccup's father. Entertainment Weekly recently detailed an scene, which features early-on in How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, which sees Butler's character return from the dead - so to speak.
Stoick died during the second How To Train Your Dragon film, and while we don't have a full-on resurrection on our hands, the fan-favourite character will return through flashbacks - his purpose being to teach his son how to be a leader.
EW explained that The Hidden World "plays with time more than its predecessors, utilizing flash-forwards as well as flashbacks." They went on to provide a full description of the scene in question - which you can read below:
One early but pivotal scene finds Hiccup recalling his (unfathomably adorable) toddler self first hearing Stoick’s tale about a secret home of dragons hidden behind a great waterfall somewhere at the edge of the world. Stoick’s dream was to seal it off and stop the fighting between humans and dragons. Hiccup, however, sees the utopia as a potential new home where the people (and pets) of Berk can safely relocate; he’s proudly, if inadvertently, turned Berk into a bustling Viking metropolis of human-dragon cooperation, but with each dragon Hiccup rescues from trappers, he increases the target on Berk’s back to a less tolerant outside world.
Stoick's return in no doubt a way to further the film's overall message, which director Dean DeBlois described as such: "the overall theme of the story is letting go, or finding the wisdom to let go."
What do you think of the scene description? Are you looking forward to How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World?
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World soars into theatres on March 1st, 2019.