Just like his synonymous character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tony Stark aka Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. has led a fairly successful career himself. But even in that tremendous success, he has had quite some failures as well, one of which is pretty important to him but still ranks as one of Downey Jr.’s career’s biggest failures.
This one movie is none other than Dolittle, which was pretty much expected and supposed to be a masterpiece holding the potential of spawning a whole franchise with multiple sequels, but which ended up failing terribly among the critics because of what Robert Downey Jr. cites as a lack of excitement “enough about the merits of the execution.”
Robert Downey Jr. Addresses Dolittle‘s Failure and the Reasons Behind It
Everyone who has seen 2020’s adventure-fantasy Dolittle knows just how incredible the film was. Yet, it still failed to garner the proper critical commendation that it not only so desperately deserved but was even expected to get by the creators of the movie.
Talking with The New York Times in July 2023 about multiple things while promoting his blockbuster Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr. addressed this very film that is considered one of his biggest failures as well.
Explaining how his end of the contract with Marvel paved the way for him to hastily jump into this new universe that “had all the promise of being another big, fun, well-executed potential franchise,” the Iron Man star said:
“I had some reservations. Me and my team seemed a little too excited about the deal and not quite excited enough about the merits of the execution. But at that point I was bulletproof. I was the guru of all genre movies.”
Because of all this prior deep faith in the movie’s success because of Downey Jr.’s skyrocketing goodwill following all the hearts he won throughout his tenure as Tony Stark in the MCU, the creators didn’t quite put enough attention to all the details, leading to the failure of Dolittle.
As the Avengers: Endgame legend continued to say:
“The stress it put on my missus [producer Susan Downey] as she rolled her sleeves up to her armpits to make it even serviceable enough to bring to market was shocking. After that point — what’s that phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste? — we had this reset of priorities and made some changes in who our closest business advisers were.”
Even though Robert Downey Jr. made sure to not make the same mistake again which led to him creating masterpieces like Sr., the documentary paying tribute to his father Robert Downey Sr., and Oppenheimer, the damage still done to Dolittle couldn’t be undone.
RDJ Still Considers Dolittle One of His “Most Important Films”
Released in 2020, Dolittle was made on a budget of a whopping $175 million but failed to bring in even twice this amount at the global box offices. As reported by Box Office Mojo, the adventure fantasy brought in only $251.4 million as its overall worldwide revenue.
Despite this, Robert Downey Jr. still considers Dolittle to be one of his “most important films” in the past two and a half decades. As he admitted to the same during the very interview with The New York Times:
“Honestly, the two most important films I’ve done in the last 25 years are The Shaggy Dog, because that was the film that got Disney saying they would insure me. Then the second most important film was Dolittle, because Dolittle was a two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity.”
Well, Dolittle may have been quite a massive “squandered opportunity” that very much had the potential of being transformed into a blatantly successful franchise had it been helmed more carefully, but at least it didn’t put that serious of a dent on Robert Downey Jr.’s career.
You can watch Dolittle on Peacock
