A new profile piece about actor/producer and former “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr. has led to an unexpected revelation – it turns out two of his biggest flops are the films he considers the most important of his career in the 21st century, thus far.
Speaking with The New York Times Magazine, the actor suggests he learns more from his failures than his success stories. As a result, he’s picked two films from his filmography you wouldn’t expect as the ones he sees as the most important to him personally – 2006’s Disney remake of “The Shaggy Dog” and 2020’s infamous flop “Dolittle”.
Downey Jr. was arrested several times between 1996-2001. After that, he was considered uninsurable for years until Disney hired him as the scene-stealing villain opposite Tim Allen in the flop “The Shaggy Dog”.
Meanwhile, “Dolittle” came after he was high on the success of “Avengers: Endgame”. It was a costly $175 million family tentpole that bombed at the box office along with garnering Downey Jr. some of the worst reviews of his career. He explains to the outlet:
“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.
The stress it put on my missus as she rolled her sleeves up to her armpits to make it even 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.”
Downey also sees a difference between the films he dubs as films and ones he calls ‘content’. In fact ‘content’ is a descriptor he levels at even at the acclaimed Netflix documentary he directed about his father “Sr.”:
“To everyone else, it was a piece of content that they could have chosen to click on and watch or not. It’s a way for me to let myself know that just because this may be the most important thing that I ever commit to a data card on a camera, it doesn’t mean it isn’t [expletive] content to everyone else.”
So what else does he see as ‘content’? “Avengers: Age of Ultron” is content, “U.S. Marshals” he dubs as ‘debatable’, whereas comedy classic “Back to School” and the period sequel “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” is certainly ‘not content’.
Downey Jr. will be seen next week in a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”. The full profile is up at The New York Times.
