Dolittle: Robert Downey Jr's Awfully Good Follow-Up To The MCU Was A Bomb
409There’s rarely been a Hollywood comeback as triumphant as that of Robert Downey Jr, who went from being a tabloid punchline of the late 90s to a ten year stint as Iron Man in the MCU, then finally winning an Oscar for his extraordinary performance in Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER, and now turning to prestige TV to play the multiple American roles in OLDBOY director Park Chan-wook’s HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning Vietnam War novel THE SYMPATHIZER. But in between his final stint in the iron suit and his return to award-worthy period dramas, RDJ was in another career rough spot when he talked to the animals as the titular doctor in the family fantasy failure known simply as DOLITTLE.
As Downey’s tenure in the Avengers drew to a close in 2018, he began filming and co-producing alongside his wife Susan on another adaptation of Hugh Lofting’s beloved children’s book series of the British veterinarian who’s learned to talk with his animal clients, previously made by Fox as an epic musical with Rex Harrison in 1967 that infamously bribed its way to a Best Picture nomination despite its critical and financial failure, and a modern-day comedy with Eddie Murphy in 1998 and its 2001 sequel which inexplicably got several direct-to-video follow ups, with both Kyla Pratt and the voice of Norm MacDonald returning for every single one.
But Downey’s Dolittle would be different under the direction of Oscar-winning TRAFFIC writer and SYRIANA director Stephen Gaghan alongside a series of big name actors voicing his animal pals, most of whom have won either Academy Awards or WrestleMania. Then after a round of reshoots in 2019 to make the movie funnier set to be directed by RENFIELD’s Chris McKay, but then handed off to NINJA TURTLES 2014’s Jonathan Leibesman, DOLITTLE dropped in January 2020 to avoid competition with RISE OF SKYWALKER only to be put down by horrible reviews and muzzled by its weak box office haul, and later referred to by Robert Downey Jr. as “a two and a half year wound of squandered opportunity” that led him to rethink his post-MCU career for the better. But since this flick was sadly not the worst event in 2020 that led to empty movie theaters, let us revisit this career downswing for the former Iron Man that led him back into a huge upswing. After all, you JoBlo subscribers may remember DOLITTLE coming out not just right before COVID, but also right after Universal’s other infamously bad movie about CGI-rendered talking animals--or should I say, singing animals? How fitting for the same studio that’d give us OPPENHEIMER to have given us a double feature that felt like the cinema equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
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