After six years of accolades from the animation industry, Dreamworks' Tales of Arcadia series came to an epic conclusion in Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans. Following a theatrical screening of the film, Series Creator and Executive Producer Guillermo del Toro, Executive Producer Chad Hammes, Director Andrew Schmidt, co-stars Lex Medrano and Charlie Saxton, and writers Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman, and Marc Guggenheim held a Q&A where they reflected on the challenges and thrills of Tales of Arcadia's cinematic climax.

After the critical and commercial success of the Tales of Arcadia universe, del Toro and the crew ended the franchise on a high note with Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans. "It was made for the big screen before the pandemic," del Toro said. "We finished during the pandemic. I think that the scope and the visuals are beautiful. For the Trollhunters community, the communal experience of being here, we're all a bunch of freaks. It's really great to have people that share what we love. I've been living with this thing for more than ten years."

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Looking back at the franchise's origins, del Toro recalled, "Originally it was pitched to Fox as a live-action series around 2007. Basically, I was pitching Stranger Things before Stranger Things. I was thinking it's a bunch of kids and they fight trolls. Then they have to do the math exam and teachers are there. [Fox] said, 'Eh.' So we wrote a book, and as it happens in Hollywood when you write a book, they wanted to see it as a movie. Jeffrey Katzenberg says, 'Let's do it as a feature.' We started cracking our brains and did a few drafts. The universe was too big for just one movie. If you read the book, it was a lot scarier and serious."

He continued, "Then I have breakfast with Jeffrey Katzenberg and he said, 'Don't kill me but would you want to do it as a show?'" After requesting del Toro and his team to turn it into a trilogy of shows, del Toro revealed, "Literally from the moment he called me forty-five minutes later, I had everything in my head. I said we'll do two more series and a finale on the big screen. They said yes to the series, but not to the finale. When we were doing Wizards, I said to them, 'Look if you let us do the finale on the big screen, we will condense Wizards. We'll do it in ten episodes, but we'll do a big finale.' They said, 'Oh, okay.' At that point, it was feasible."

Del Toro teased a potential future for the franchise, saying, "Now we don't know if this is going to succeed or not, in the sense of, I just pitched a crazy idea to DreamWorks, which is to generate two shorts a year for the next four years where we continue capping these things and have fun. I don't know if he was going to happen or not, but we wanted to have a choice."

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Chad Hammes joked about how his time on the series had broken him. "From the beginning of Trollhunters, we looked at the script and we were like, how the hell are we ever going to make 52 episodes of this? Especially with [del Toro] saying every episode must be great," he said. "Every episode must be great... Each television series had its own challenges. Obviously, it was the hardest to make Trollhunters. It's the hardest to build that whole world and get those personalities and those characters so that you really believe they're real people. 3Below was a whole different challenge, being a Sci-Fi sort of based thing. And you always have to keep making things look better, even with the old stuff."

"Wizards was its own thing," Hammes continued. "We really polished that one up and laid a lot of effects, and that sort of fed to us getting warmed up for this movie because basically, when Mark and I had Guillermo give us the script for the first time to read, I think just about everybody in the production team got in the fetal position and crawled into a corner, a dark corner and just cried for probably two days. And then we sort of pulled our pants up and said, we got to do this. We got to make this really, really well... You just become numb and you finally just say, let the creative rivers flow, we'll figure this out." Del Toro added that there was a sign for the production team that read: Your ambition should always exceed your budget. "Chad hated that sign," del Toro revealed with a laugh.

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Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans

Andrew Schmidt directed Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans alongside Johane Matte and Francisco Ruiz Velasco. Reflecting on the experience, Schmidt shared, "I have to say working with them was easy, in the sense that they're collaborative, and that we all sort of kept eyes on each other's acts. And so hats off to them. First of all, Joanne and Francisco did an amazing job. We'd go and we'd toil away on our acts and then we put it up for all of you guys to see and we'd beat on each other... It was a very positive and rewarding experience, but it's a very difficult experience. And we were there to give each other notes and prop each other up when we were hitting walls and having difficulties on how we can get this done."

"There were parts in my act where I would go to Francisco or Joanne and say, 'I have no idea how to do this. How am I going to pull this off?' And Francisco would crank out a few drawings or Joanne would give me some notes," Schmidt continued. "So it was very collaborative in that way, it was just very supportive, very helpful. And then we'd show it to the team and to all you guys. And then you'd weigh in on what was working, what wasn't... It's not what's good or bad, it's what's working and what's not working. So it was always about getting things working and trying to hit the emotional moments."

Based on Guillermo del Toro's Tales of Arcadia trilogy series, Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans is now streaming on Netflix.

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