If you ask any actor in Hollywood what they feel is their most valuable film or show, it may not surprise you if they are their most popular works. Regarding the two most important movies in his career, Robert Downey Jr. has surprising picks in that neither is a Marvel movie. The actor, known for his tenure as Iron Man, has plenty of beloved projects under his belt, including The Avengers, Sherlock Holmes, and Tropic Thunder. Instead of naming any of those, he picked two flops that few people liked as the most important to him: Dolittle and The Shaggy Dog.
The former is recent enough to remember as he stepped into the shoes of the doctor who could talk to animals for a more adventurous take than the Eddie Murphy movies. The Shaggy Dog followed Tim Allen as an everyday family man who finds himself infused with a sheepdog’s DNA, turning him into the dog. Both were poorly received box office flops yet were deemed important movies by Robert Downey Jr. for business-related reasons in two different parts of his career. He was trying to rebuild said career after having a tarnished reputation in an attempt to maintain momentum after a megahit franchise.
The Two Flopped Movies Robert Downey Jr. Found a Positive Side for in His Career’s Future
In an interview with The New York Times, the actor went on about why these films had been the “two most important films” he had done “in the last 25 years.” He talked about jumping from Endgame to Dolittle, which he and his team thought would be “another big, fun, well-executed potential franchise.” After thinking he was “bulletproof” and “the guru of all genre movies,” things got out of hand. He admitted he and his team got “too excited about the deal” without thinking about the execution. Enough attempts were made for the film to work, which he largely credited co-producer and his wife, Susan Downey’s, methods for something “serviceable.”
“The stress it put on my missus as she rolled her sleeves up to her armpits to make it serviceable enough to bring to market was shocking. After that point — what’s that phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste? — we had this reset of priorities and made some changes in who our closest business advisers were.”
Dolittle had come out to both bad reviews and tough competition. With fellow January releases like Bad Boys for Life and December movies going into the new year, like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, its performance crumbled, grossing $251 million worldwide. It had a budget of $175 million.
When it came to the failure of The Shaggy Dog, a film that grossed $87 million from a $50 million budget, as an essential in the catalog of movies Robert Downey Jr. has starred in, the reasoning was simpler. It came down to “Disney saying they would insure” the actor. The company did more than that after acquiring Marvel a year after the release of Iron Man.
Bad movies have not weighed down Robert Downey Jr. The actor will soon be in one of the biggest movies of the year with Oppenheimer on July 21.
