‘How to Train Your Dragon’ Overtakes the Domestic Box Office of One of the Best War Movies Ever

Having played in theaters worldwide for less than a month, Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon remake is all set to overtake the original animated film, which debuted 15 years ago. The live-action remake passed the $450 million mark at the worldwide box office this past weekend, while also hitting the $200 million milestone domestically. This puts it ahead of one of the highest-grossing World War II movies ever made. How to Train Your Dragon is also overtaking the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe underperformer Captain America: Brave New World on the domestic charts, as it aims to conclude its run as one of the 200 highest-grossing movies ever made.

The film’s $200 million domestic haul puts it ahead of Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor, which debuted back in 2001, and concluded its run with $198 million domestically and $450 million worldwide. Pearl Harbor cost a reported $140 million to produce, and earned mixed reviews from critics. Starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale, the movie holds a terrible 24% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, whose consensus reads, “Pearl Harbor tries to be the Titanic of war movies, but it’s just a tedious romance filled with laughably bad dialogue. The 40-minute action sequence is spectacular though.”

The great critic Roger Ebert was particularly scathing in his review, describing Pearl Harbor as “a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.” This marked Affleck’s second collaboration with Bay, after the blockbuster Armageddon. The movie established him as an A-list star, but this status was short-lived, because he experienced several major setbacks not too long afterward. Affleck mostly stars in direct-to-streaming titles these days, and was last seen in The Accountant 2, which made a little over $100 million worldwide.

Michael Bay Has Made Grown-Up Movies In Between His Franchise Films

Bay’s last movie was Ambulance, which underperformed at the box office despite mostly positive reviews. After Pearl Harbor, the filmmaker made the mostly forgotten science fiction film The Island, and then delivered five films in the Transformers franchise. He has, however, attempted to branch out in between these franchise titles, with standalone original such as Pain & Gain, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, and Ambulance. He is said to be circling a return to the Transformers franchise next. You can watch How to Train Your Dragon in theaters, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.