Gerard Butler Worried About Making A Sequel To One Of His Best Movies
Gerard Butler is the Picasso of trash cinema. Across a career spanning three decades, he's starred in exemplar schlockfests like "Dracula 2000" (the movie where we learn that Dracula and Judas Iscariot (!) are one and the same) and "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life" (a film where Angelina Jolie punches a shark in the nose before hitching a ride on its dorsal fin), along with "Law Abiding Citizen," "Den of Thieves," "Plane," the "Fallen" movies, and many more like them. When he isn't playing diabolical baddies or rugged mavericks, he can often be found portraying bellow-y bearded bruisers, be they Beowulf in 2005's "Beowulf & Grendel" or, most famously, King Leonidas in "300."
That extends to writer/directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois' 2010 film "How to Train Your Dragon," one of the best mainstream American animated features of the 21st century and a movie that similarly has Butler lending his voice to the bellow-y bearded bruiser Stoick the Vast, the chieftain of the Viking village of Berk. Stoick's son, the ungainly Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), is the actual protagonist in the film, itself a boy-and-his-dog-style coming of age narrative where the "dog," named Toothless, is a dragon in a world where dragons and Vikings have long been at war with one another. The central theme of the film — that ignorance breeds prejudice and people (and dragons!) contain multitudes — also applies to Stoick, who gradually reveals a depth to his character that belies his brutish surface.
A critical darling and sizable box office hit, "How to Train Your Dragon" was newfound territory for Butler in many ways — not least of which is that it was probably the first time he genuinely worried about making a sequel that didn't live up to its predecessor.
How to Train Your Dragon 2 kept the franchise soaring
"How to Train Your Dragon 2," which saw DeBlois writing and directing on his own, debuted in 2014 to tremendous fanfare. Speaking with Collider at the time of the film's release, Butler declared its predecessor "one of my favorite movies ever," stating that he'd been "blown away with it" when he saw the finished product. "[...] And then, because I'm a worrier, I just worried, once we were making the second, about how it was possibly going to live up to that, but they constantly surprised us," he admitted before adding:
"I think the second one is even better. It pushes the limits and stakes, in so many ways. The animation has come along so much, and they've made absolute beautiful use of that to make this visually exhilarating ride that you go on, and yet never shied away from bringing up darker issues and keeping it really exciting and emotional. I was just blown away. I've now seen it with two audiences, and it's great to watch with an audience because they get so into it, with everybody crying or cheering. I'm very proud to be a part of it."
While I'm inclined to argue the original "How to Train Your Dragon" remains the best in the series, the second and third film, 2019's "The Hidden World" (also written and directed by DuBlois), are both great in their own right. "How to Train Your Dragon 2," in particular, allowed the franchise to mature alongside its characters and young audience, enriching its mythology while adding new wrinkles to the first movie's conflict between humans and dragons (in addition to providing more of the same terrific animation and airborne action sequences). Butler may specialize in garbage entertainment, but as with Stoick, the "Dragon" series shows there's more to him than you might think.