Robert Downey Jr.'s DOLITTLE Completely Tanked and Could Lose $100 Million

Robert Downey Jr.’s first big project since his time at Marvel came to an end was Dolittle. Universal Pictures made a big bet on this movie and gave it a production budget of $175 million. That’s a lot of money, but with the star of Iron Man attached to star in the film, how could it fail!?

Well, that’s an easy question to answer. There wasn’t a market out there for this kind of story and there wasn’t a lot of interest. Then the people who did go out and see it didn’t like it, so there wasn’t any good word of mouth. The one thing everyone is talking about is Robert Downey Jr. pulling bagpipes out of a dragon's ass! Unfortunately, what could have been a decent film was plagued by a bad story and script that focused more on kid humor than story. Downey Jr.’s star power couldn’t even save it.

According to Yahoo, it’s projected the movie could lose $100 million dollars! That would be an even bigger loss than Universal’s Cats! That film lost $70 million. So, Universal Pictures is not having a very good year.

Over its 4-day domestic opening weekend, the film made $30 million and it had a global opening launch of $50 million. It also doesn’t help that film currently has an 18% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

What’s crazy about this, is this Dolittle film project was in hot demand among studios when it was being shopped around. Everyone wanted in on it back in 2017 when Downey Jr. was making hit after hit at Marvel. Plus he had the Sherlock Holmes films, which showed the actor had box office strength outside of the Marvel films. It seemed like a safe bet and a recipe for success, but I don’t know what they were thinking when they greenlit the script that was written for it!

Downey Jr.’s star power alone can’t be the backbone of the film, but when Downey Jr. has a good script and character to play, it can work! He just needs the right material, and Dolittle was not it.