The latest installment in the How to Train Your Dragon saga – the new Dreamworks series Dragons: The Nine Realms – actually provides the perfect timeline for the ongoing franchise. By shifting the setting from the original trilogy’s Viking roots, the new show can both expand the entire story and show dragons in an entirely new context. For anyone invested in the series, this represents an exciting opportunity to both push boundaries and deliver more of what has proved successful to this point.

Although concrete information about the Dragons: The Nine Realms series is currently sketchy, it’s clear from the show’s logline and limited marketing that it will take place in a completely different contemporary setting from the original acclaimed How to Train Your Dragon series. As Dreamworks’ statement explains, the show envisages a modern society that has completely forgotten about the existence of dragons until a huge fissure opens up along the earth’s surface. This then brings a rag-tag group of misfit kids into contact with dragons for the first time, setting them on an adventure to maintain the secret of where the dragons have been hiding.

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The decision to change up from the original How to Train Your Dragon setting will benefit Dragons: The Nine Realms for a number of reasons. Not only does it provide a fresh environment for humans and dragons to interact that feels more relatable for a modern audience, but it also creates a huge period of time for future spin-offs and sequels to explore the relationship between the two species. As a result, the new show could actually lay the foundations for a far more expansive franchise than anything that could have been imagined at the end of How to Train Your Dragon 3.

The logline for the new show confirms that Dragons: The Nine Realms is set 1300 years after the events of the final movie. In addition to the implications for seeing dragons in the modern world, this huge time jump means that the storytellers have an opportunity to create a richly layered history of dragon lore in the imagined universe. This means that the series can not only draw on the stories from the first films but also potentially untold adventures from throughout the following millennium. Given the studio’s clear ambition for continued world-building for the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, this gives scope for future stories to cherry-pick from 1300 years of shared history as a setting. For audiences interested in seeing the human/dragon relationship evolve and develop in a number of different contexts, this is seriously exciting.

While it remains to be seen whether the new spin-off will be successful, the very fact that the story will take place such a long time after the original films and in a shared universe means that any future projects have a huge number of options for settings. Had the new series been set at a similar time to the trilogy, any future time jumps would have felt out of keeping with the wider franchise. As it is, Dragons: The Nine Realms will not only be more relatable to a modern audience but will allow future How to Train Your Dragon projects far greater scope for genuinely exciting experimentation.

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Thomas Lethbridge
(133 Articles Published)

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After an eclectic career incorporating scuba diving, cheffing and teaching, Tommy eventually found his calling as a writer. With an early focus on food, he now specialises in all aspects of entertainment. Despite being a Lord of the Rings and Alien obsessive, his real passion is for truly terrible movies. He loves anything with a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating and rarely passes up an opportunity to watch The Room. Tommy is based in London and joined the Screen Rant team in 2021.

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