5 Years Ago, Robert Downey Jr.’s Big Post-Iron Man Movie Was A Box Office Disaster

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“At that point, I was perfect. I was the guru of every genre of film,” Robert Downey Jr. will say when Oppenheimer hits theaters in 2023. The film won the “Best Picture” award and grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide. RDJ also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Did you mean at the point he was talking about? Around 2017, when he appeared in a movie called “The Voyages of Professor Dolittle” (later simply shortened to “Dolittle”).

The huge success of Oppenheimer established Downey as the undisputed star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even outside of Iron Man. After more than a decade as Tony Stark, his career has been revived beyond all expectations. This made him a worldwide superstar, rivaled only by the likes of Tom Cruise. But the actor wasn’t bulletproof, as evidenced by the disaster of Dolittle, the biggest failure of Downey’s wild career. For better or worse, it’s the movie that brought Star back to Earth.

This week on “Tales from the Box Office,” we look back at “Dolittle” to commemorate its 5th anniversary. How this movie came to be, how overconfidence derailed production, what happened when the movie was released in theaters, what happened after its release, and how the years have passed. Let’s see what lessons we can learn from this movie. . Shall we dig deeper?

The film is based on the classic novel “Doctor Dolittle” by Hugh Lofting. This isn’t the first time Hollywood has tried to adapt the story of a man who can talk to animals. There was a 1967 version starring Rex Harrison as the title character, and a 1998 version starring Eddie Murphy. The difference this time around, aside from casting the world’s biggest stars, was that Universal Pictures was turning the Lofting story into a grand historical epic rather than a more straightforward interpretation.

“Dolittle” is set in 19th century England and centers on Dr. John Dolittle, who lives alone in his mansion, with only his talking exotic animals to keep him company. When young Queen Victoria falls ill, an eccentric doctor and his animal friends set off on an epic adventure to a mysterious island in search of a cure.

It’s worth considering some context here. As Downey suggested, he was in perfect shape for the 2020s. When Iron Man was released in theaters in 2008, it was an unlikely smash hit. Prior to that, the actor was nearly unemployed due to problems early in his career and personal life. However, this film changed everything, marking the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and RDJ’s decade-long string of epic hits.

It all culminated in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame, which briefly became the biggest movie of all time, grossing nearly $2.8 billion worldwide. It also led to Downey’s (temporary) exit from the MCU, and all eyes were on what Downey would do next after Iron Man took over. So there was a lot of pressure on Dolittle almost by default. Downey’s MCU movies include $12 billion. Expectations were very high.

Universal Pictures went all out for this movie, investing a huge budget of $175 million. $20 million of that went to Downey’s salary alone. Stephen Gaghan (Syriana, Gold) was a somewhat unlikely choice to direct the blockbuster.

Due to the project’s high profile, the studio has signed on to a roster of actors including Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Antonio Banderas (The Mask of Zorro), and Emma Thompson (Saving Mr. Banks). We were able to secure the missing ensemble. ), Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), John Cena (Bumblebee), Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures), and more. They also enlisted the legendary Danny Elfman (Batman, Spider-Man) to compose the music. What could go wrong? Apparently there are a lot.

The first cut of “Dolittle” worried Universal executives and led to expensive rewrites and reshoots. More animals and laughs were added to appeal to a wider audience, with Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie) and Jonathan Liebesman (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) directing Gaghan’s film. was called to help shape the. . As we’ll see later, many of the additions during this time are what resulted in the film being panned by critics.

The infamous “Dolittle” scene where the dragon farts was actually Downey’s idea. This happened in the third act and was symbolic of what the movie had become. To that end, reflecting on his failure in a 2023 interview, RDJ called Dolittle one of the most important films he ever made, but for all the wrong reasons.

“The two most important movies I’ve made in the last 25 years are ‘Shaggy Dog,’ because it was this movie that Disney said they would insure me with. The movie was “Dolittle.” “I was hurt by two and a half years of wasted opportunities.”

It turned out that the actor’s harsh words were the basis. Dolittle had everything going on behind the scenes to cause a disaster, from expensive reshoots and rewrites to an ever-changing release date. There’s also a bit of a prejudice that January is Hollywood’s “bad month,” with most movies being bad or boring. Fair or not, Universal’s choice to release Robert Downey Jr.’s star-studded film in January rather than releasing it in the summer doesn’t seem very confident. Ta.

Sadly, Universal had no reason to be confident. The movie was a mess and critics tore it to shreds. Dolittle was given a 4 out of 10 review by /Film and was called “An Unconventional Voyage.” Critics largely agreed with that assessment, which led to a lot of negative buzz heading into opening weekend. In any case, the movie was released in theaters on January 17, 2020, and opened in direct competition with the long-awaited “Bad Boys for Life.” It turned out to be a dire scenario.

Bad Boys for Life topped the charts with $62.5 million and ultimately grossed $426.5 million worldwide, making it Hollywood’s biggest hit of the year. Meanwhile, “Dolittle” finished in third place with just $21.8 million, behind Oscar favorite “1917” ($21.9 million), which was in its fourth weekend of release. It also didn’t hurt that films like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Little Women, and Knives Out were doing very well in theaters. It was a train wreck.

Almost the only positive for Universal was that the film held up decently the following weekend with only a 44% drop. But that hardly matters when a $200 million over-budget blockbuster opens far below expectations. In the end, Dolittle ended with a whopping $77 million domestically, $174.3 million overseas, and $251.4 million worldwide. The studio’s take-home pay is not enough to cover marketing costs, let alone the budget.

One of the biggest challenges for Universal (and the world as well) was the pandemic, which shut down all of Hollywood in March 2020. Unfortunately, the studio was forced to postpone the rest of its plans by months or years. An uncertain future ahead of them. Dolittle was the studio’s biggest film released that year, and the studio suffered huge losses. Estimates vary widely, but given that theaters keep about half of their box office revenue, the losses would be in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more.

In the months that followed, with theaters around the world closed for an uncertain period of time, Universal adopted a premium VOD model and charged $20 per movie to release its new film Trolls World Tour domestically. This was the first studio to open to the public. rental. Universal continues to be one of the biggest champions of PVOD to this day, despite the fact that it’s undoubtedly cutting into theatrical revenue. It may not be an exaggeration to say that this failure has heightened the company’s sense of crisis in terms of generating revenue outside of theaters.

Even if the world didn’t shut down just a few weeks later, it was a huge failure. For Downey, it was a stain on his impeccable record. Let’s not forget that this actor also turned “Sherlock Holmes” into a blockbuster theatrical series in the 2010s. This failure reshaped the actor’s thinking about how he wanted to approach his post-Marvel career.

This failure may have somehow contributed to his decision to return to the MCU as Doctor Doom rather than Tony Stark in Avengers: Doomsday. After the Farting Dragon fiasco, safety doesn’t seem so bad. It’s one idea to get an Oscar and then get a crowd-pleasing payday.

“From that point on, what’s that phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste?” Downey said, looking back on “Dolittle” in a 2023 profile. “We reprioritized and changed our closest business advisors.”

This movie is an important lesson about the dangers of overconfidence. I feel like at every stage everyone involved thought this was going to work. RDJ and his team apparently felt that taking on another big series was the way to go after he retired as an Ironman. However, if the venture is not born from a creative field, it will be an even tougher uphill battle. In this incident, Downey and everyone else involved fell off the mountain. This experience will no doubt be part of his calculations in every decision he makes going forward.

For Universal, and for Hollywood as a whole, this should be a wake-up call about the dangers of assuming that IP for IP’s sake is meaningful. Just because something already exists doesn’t mean it will be important to the public. “Blade Runner 2049” is another great example of this, even though the film was widely considered to be a masterpiece creatively, commercially.

Another big red flag here is the amount of money spent on many of the issues that plagued Dolittle. First of all, $175 million is an astronomical amount for a movie of this kind. Forget about expensive reshoots and rewrites. More importantly, these reshoots and rewrites weren’t meant to be the best creative decisions. They were going for the lowest common denominator, assuming the animals and cheap humor would sell tickets. in short? Throwing money at creative problems rarely yields answers. That’s how dragon farts come out.