Robert Downey Jr in Dolittle Photo: Alamy
Forget the plot holes — when Robert Downey Jr and his Dolittle crew arrived in Gwynedd in the summer of 2018 , the big problem was the pothole. A huge dent had pitted the road leading to the Menai Suspension Bridge for years, to the annoyance of locals who called the crater «Bangor's biggest».
But now Iron Man himself rushed to the rescue. Doolittle was a family adventure meant to mark the next chapter for Downey Jr. after he left the Marvel Universe. A key scene was to be filmed on the bridge connecting Anglesey to mainland Wales. First, the film crew had to drive around this pothole in order to drive trucks into it. Or bury her, which they did properly. “I travel a lot for work and I have never seen such a big pothole. Nobody wanted to do anything about it,” said one of the many residents who are pleased that Hollywood has caught the slack in the local council.
Doolittle was a godsend for disillusioned passengers in northwest Wales. However, this story about an eccentric professor who talked to animals would be a monkey on the back of Hollywood financiers. They are estimated to have lost up to £60m due to the film when it crashed and burned in early 2020 — in those last bittersweet weeks of normality before Covid hit.
However, in a recent interview, Robert Downey Jr revealed that when it comes to Dolittle, he is on the side of the people of Gwynedd. He called the project one of his «most important films» of the past 25 years. Not because it helped the actor break out of the shadows of Iron Man and Marvel. But because it served as a lesson on how not to do it.
«Honestly, the two most important films I've done in the last 25 years are Shaggy Dog, because that's the movie that Disney said they would insure me for,» he told The New York Times. «Then the second most important movie was Dolittle, because Dolittle is a two and a half year wound of missed opportunities.»
Shaggy Dog is a 2006 Disney comedy in which Downey Jr. finally returned to the Hollywood mainstream. It was considered defective after years of drug abuse and run-ins with the police. With Shaggy Dog, Disney agreed to trust him. He returned and starred in Iron Man two years later.
Dolittle is remembered for another reason. It was a misfire after the release of Marvel, which Downey Jr. produced with his wife Susan while working at Team Downey Productions. And the lesson he learned from that was that he shouldn't jump headlong into another franchise.
«The stress he put on my missus when she rolled up her sleeves to her underarms to make her marketable enough was shocking,» Downey Jr said of the bombshell. “After this moment, what is this phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste? “We have reprioritized and made some changes to our closest business advisors.”
Some horror films are later rehabilitated as cult classics — horror eventually becomes a source of surprise and even joy. Doolittle is not such a terrible movie. It's a clumsy mix of comedy and adventure, filled with shabby CGI beasts, and featuring a quirky central performance by Downey Jr. who gave Doolittle a dreadful blow to his Welsh accent.
He had no time for the Welsh. Quite the opposite: Downey Jr. felt like he was taking his job seriously, grounding Dr. Dolittle in reality. “Before I signed up, I just Googled ‘weirdest Welsh doctor’,” he recalls. «I just wanted to think, I don't want to just do another English accent… so there was this guy called William Price, a crazy Welsh doctor, he was a neo-druidist, he believed he could communicate with all of nature and all that.»
The accent is the least of the film's woes. The real problem was trying to combine comedy and action. How inappropriately these components came together was made clear in the infamous late scene in which Dr. John Doolittle performs a colonoscopy on a dragon. After fumbling around a bit, he pulls out the bagpipes blocking the unfortunate reptile. This is a scene that will forever remain in the memory of those who were not lucky enough to experience it.
How did Robert Downey Jr., famous character actor-turned-superhero, end up giving an enema to a computer dragon? Short answer: the sequence was his idea, and since he and his wife were co-producers, no one dared to say no. The longer answer is that Doolittle was a terrible idea, doomed to failure even without a locking dragon.
By 2018, Downey Jr had had his fill of Marvel and was eager to move on. But he still wanted to make hits. In 2017, Universal approached him and his wife about Dolittle. The proposal was to remake a 1967 musical comedy starring Rex Harrison, adapted from Hugh Lofting's best-selling Dr. Dolittle books that began in 1920 with The Doctor Dolittle Story. jpg» />“I ended my contract with Marvel and then rushed into what was going to be another big, fun, well-executed potential franchise in Dolittle,” Downey Jr. explained in an interview with the New York Times. “I had some reservations. My team and I seemed too excited about this deal and not excited enough about its merits.”
The first mistake was the choice of the director. Stephen Gagan made his reputation with dark thrillers like Syriana. However, Dolittle needed the ability to work with CGI — Idris Elba, Rami Malek, Tom Holland, Selena Gomez and Emma Thompson were some of the animal voice stars — and combine action and comedy. Alas, early test screenings showed him to be unsuitable for the job. Like Downey Jr. pulling a bagpipe from a dragon, Gagan came up with something strange and disgusting.
«This is not the movie he should have been making,» a person connected with the production told the Hollywood Reporter. “People supported him, thinking: “We will surround him with the best teams,” but at some point it became clear that this was not working. And by then it was already too late. And everything was ready.”
Director Stephen Gagan with Harry Collett Robert Downey Jr. on the set of Dolittle. Photo: Alamy
The biggest problem was that Geagan's Dolittle was too dark. The ending was especially dark. It centered around the death of Dolittle's wife and his relationship with his son. «It was like a moody father-son story, and it didn't have a lot of animal presence,» the insider said.
In a panic, Universal executives called Seth Rogen and asked him to write some jokes for re-shoots that would remove the macabre father and son point of view (and finally replace the constipated dragon). Rogen chipped in, but then had to leave for another project.
Enter Chris McKay, director of the Lego Batman Movie. He soon followed Rogen out the door to film Tomorrow's War with Chris Pratt. Finally, the studio enlisted the services of Jonathan Liebesman, who helmed the well-received Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot, which featured humor, action, and animal CGI. He was put on a plane and joined the Downey family in Wales, where they filmed this scene on the Menai Suspension Bridge.
But although Liebesman and screenwriter John Whittington were told that they had to save the project, they didn't consider Downey Jr., who came up with the idea of a dragon colonoscopy and sought to bring it to the screen. To quote one crew member: «When Iron Man talks to you, you listen to Iron Man.»
Robert Downey Jr and Jesse Buckley in Dolittle. iffed for release. “There was a good sense of community,” the insider said. «It was a non-toxic set.»
Good emotions were not transmitted to the screen. Doolittle was criticized. «The story remains weak, performances shaky, laughter infrequent,» wrote the New York Times. The Telegraph lamented the «heavily reworked storyline» in a two-star review.
Viewers agreed. With a sense of disaster already looming over Doolittle, they kept their distance and the project struggled to recoup its $175 million budget. Plans for a sequel were thwarted, and then the pandemic hit, and we all had a lot to worry about, besides Emma Thompson's unconvincing voice of the computer parrot.
However, one person remembered Dolittle: Downey Jr. After the film's devastating effects, he moved away from blockbusters and instead helped direct The Elder, a low-key 2022 documentary about his bohemian father, Robert Downey Sr. He is coming back. hits theaters on July 21 with a supporting role in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Iron Man has learned to turn down the spotlight and become the great character actor he was always meant to be. All it took was CGI and a bagpipe dragon inserted where the sun never shines.
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