> Having worked in the animated film industry for a while, there's so much that does get changed in both pre production and production that people don't hear about.
I wonder what some of the biggest changes to happen in production are?
One of the biggest I've read about is How to Train Your Dragon.
The book series is aimed at kids around 10 years old. The main characters, such as Hiccup, are around that age. The vikings are not at war with the dragons, and many vikings have dragons as pets, mounts, and hunting aids. Toothless is in the books, but he is not a Night Fury--those do not exist in the book universe. He's just a common garden dragon (their model became the Terrible Terrors in the movies), named Toothless because he lost his teeth.
The big issue in the first book is a rite of passage where kids have to train a dragon or be exiled. Toothless offends another dragon during this, a big fight breaks out, this is seen as a failure of training, and Hiccup and the other kids also undergoing the rite are going to be exiled.
They were 3 years into production of a very faithful following of the book, with large parts animated and most of the dialog recorded, when they realized they were going to end up with a "drop off" movie.
Kids around 10 would love it...but their parents or their older siblings who had taken the kids to the theater would not be interested. They would just drop the kids off at a mall theater and go hang out at the food court or shop or something until time to pick the kids up.
Making a drop off movie is fine if you don't spend a lot of money on it. HTTYD was a $160+ million movie, though, and no way can a drop off movie come anywhere near making that back, let alone profit.
So one year before it was supposed to be released, they put "The Croods" on hold and moved Chris Sanders from that to take over as director of HTTYD, with the task of coming up with a completely new story...and they didn't move back the release date.
Sanders brought in Dean DeBlois, who had been his writing/directing partner on "Lilo & Stitch" when they were both at Disney, to be co-writer/co-director.
They made the kids 15 instead of 10, created the viking/dragon war, added Astrid and Ruffnut, created Night Furies and upgraded Toothless to one. They needed a lot of new models, new settings, and mostly new dialog.