Having been reborn like a phoenix from the ashes of a ruined career, Robert Downey Jr. cemented himself as one of the biggest, most popular, and highest-paid stars on the planet thanks to his legendary run as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Iron Man.
His post-Tony Stark career didn’t get off to the strongest of starts, though, with Dolittle losing $100 million and gaining a reputation as one of the heftiest flops in cinematic history. And yet, along with forgotten 2006 dramedy The Shaggy Dog, RDJ named it as one of the two most important movies he’s made in the last quarter of a century when being profiled by The New York Times, and it makes complete sense.
“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. 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. 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.”
When discussing his heartfelt documentary Sr., he admitted that even though it’s his most personal project by far, to others it’s nothing more than “a piece of content that they could have chosen to click on and watch or not.” Applying that sentiment to his own filmography, he named Avengers: Age of Ultron as “content,” but Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was not.
As for Dolittle? Well, he deemed it as the kick-off to “this reset of priorities and made some changes in who our closest business advisers were,” which looks to have paid off already based on Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Oppenheimer.
