All of the marketing for Dolittle hardly made it seem as though we had a winner on our hands, but somehow Robert Downey Jr.’s first non-Marvel Cinematic Universe movie since 2014 turned out worse than most people could have possibly imagined. While the fantasy blockbuster’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is shockingly higher than the general critical consensus, reviews have nonetheless been destroying the family flick ever since it was first screened.
Dolittle is already predicted to lose over $100 million for the studio when all is said and done, which is nothing short of a disaster for a project that ended up costing an eye-watering $175 million to put together, and despite 2020 only being three weeks old, we may have witnessed the year’s biggest box office bomb already.
Like many troubled productions, early test screenings for Dolittle were such a disaster that Universal added three weeks of hugely expensive reshoots in order to try and salvage the movie, reportedly lightening the tone and adding more humor in a last-ditch attempt to broaden the appeal and to entice younger children and international audiences to the theater. Unfortunately, that only seems to have created a tonal mess, with many reviews pointing out how jarringly the script veers from whimsical fantasy to lowbrow humor on an almost scene-by-scene basis.
There’s one moment in Dolittle that people simply can’t stop talking about though, and for those that have no interest in watching the movie out of anything other than morbid curiosity, this next sentence is hardly going to change your mind. The scene in question finds RDJ’s title character using a leek provided to him by a duck in order to carry out a colonoscopy on a dragon, resulting in the removal of a variety of objects including the corpses of several Spanish soldiers and a set of bagpipes, with the dragon thanking the good doctor for his help by breaking wind directly in his face. Yes, this happens.
It turns out that the sequence was added as part of the lengthy and costly reshoots in order to make Dolittle more family friendly, and quite how anyone at the studio thought that this would help the movie avoid financial disaster is really anybody’s guess. At the very least, it now seems that the box office dud will retain some level of infamy, instead of being forgotten about entirely in a matter of weeks.