The movie Robert Downey Jr admitted was a “squandered opportunity”
The role of Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe may have brought the career of Robert Downey Jr back from the brink and launched it to new heights, but it proved highly restrictive in other ways.
Following the one-two punch of Iron Man and his Academy Award-nominated performance in Tropic Thunder released within weeks of each other in 2008, the resurgent star was rarely seen outside his comic book comfort zone from then on out.
In fact, between 2012’s The Avengers and 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, Downey Jr appeared in nine features, seven of which had him reprising his role as Stark. The only outliers were David Dobkin’s The Judge and Jon Favreau’s Chef, and in the latter he only made a brief cameo appearance. When his time in the MCU was up, it was time to embark on a new chapter, which couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start.
For his first project free from the shackles of Kevin Feige’s superhero juggernaut, Downey Jr produced and played the title role in Dolittle, which tanked horrendously. Extensive rewrites and reshoots had driven the budget up to an eye-watering $175million, and it lost a fortune due to a combination of releasing in January 2020 right before the world ground to a standstill, and being awful.
Countless writers were brought in to polish what was fast becoming a steaming turd of cinema, including Seth Rogen, who even compared it to a scam. “Some movies are like scams. It’s like buying blueprints to a house that looks nice, but when you try to actually build the house it doesn’t stand up properly,” he explained. “I’ll only say this because it was reported and I’m going to tread lightly because I am close with many of the people involved, but I did that on the Dr. Dolittle film.”
As for Downey Jr, he looked back on its failure as one of the most important moments of his career, which wasn’t the expected outcome after his maiden post-MCU sojourn had gone down in a ball of flames.
“I finished the Marvel contract and then hastily went into what had all the promise of being another big, fun, well-executed potential franchise in Dolittle,” he said to The New York Times. “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.”
Describing Dolittle as “a two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity,” the star was forced to reassess his creative priorities in the aftermath. Fortunately, that led him right into the path of Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer, which in turn netted him another Oscar nomination.
