Robert Downey Jr. is opening up about Dolittle, the 2020 film that was ill-reviewed and has a 15% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
In a recent interview, Downey said the movie directed by Stephen Gaghan and based on Hugh Lofting’s second Doctor Dolittle book was one of the most important films he’s done in the past two decades.
“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 told The New York Times Magazine. “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.”
He continued, “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.”
The Shaggy Dog is a 2006 film starring Tim Allen in which Downey Jr. plays the villain Dr. Kozak.
The Iron Man actor not only starred in Dolittle, but he was also a producer alongside his wife Susan Downey adding, “The stress it put on my missus as she rolled her sleeves up to her armpits to make it even serviceable enough to bring to market was shocking.”
Downey Jr. notes that following Dolittle, he changed his priorities and since then he embarked on producing a Netflix documentary called Sr, centered around his relationship with his father living with Parkinson’s Disease.
“It’s a way for me to let myself know that just because this may be the most important thing that I ever commit to a data card on a camera, it doesn’t mean it isn’t [expletive] content to everyone else,” he added.
Downey Jr. will next be seen in Oppenheimer, which hits theaters on July 21.
