The team behind Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon franchise just did something that most studios aren’t willing to do. They said goodbye to a cash cow in service to the story. We’ve seen it countless times. Studios will milk all they can out of a franchise. How many Land Before Time films are there now? We stopped counting at 12. Time and time again, stories are squeezed until they die instead of being allowed to go out on top. Thankfully, that is not going to be the case with How To Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World. Here’s what the film’s director had to say in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly:

“We thought about it for a long time and came up with what we think is a bittersweet way to say goodbye to these characters, but the right way,” says DeBlois, who also co-wrote and directed Lilo & Stitch with former HTTYD collaborator Chris Sanders. Hidden World not only marks the end of Hiccup’s trilogy but, to DeBlois’ knowledge, also the end of its television spin-offs. The writer-director likens the trilogy’s finale to the way Cowell signed off her book series when she ended it in 2015: “You will understand why Hiccup says, as you heard in the trailer, ‘There were dragons when I was a boy.’ And by the end of this film, you’ll have answered the question [of] what could have happened to them.”

Basically… bring tissues.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World stars Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, America Ferrera, Cate Blanchett, Kit Harington, Craig Ferguson, and F. Murray Abraham and is set to hit theaters on March 1, 2019,

Source: EW