Seth Rogen Admits This Robert Downey Jr. Movie Was A Scam

If you were underwhelmed by this year's Robert Downey Jr. vehicle Dolittle, you weren't alone - and one of the flick's script doctors knows why.

Seth Rogen, who was brought in to do an uncredited punch-up on Dolittle's screenplay, had some harsh words about the film during a recent conversation with Howard Stern. According to him, the whole production was essentially a house of cards waiting to come crashing down.

Rogen often serves as a writer on his own films, but it's not exactly common knowledge that he's often tapped to rehab problematic screenplays, so respected are his writing skills. In the case of Dolittle, he says that he immediately recognized the project for what it was: An empty shell.

Rogen told Stern:

"Some movies are like scams. It's like buying blueprints to a house that looks nice, but when you try to actually build the house it doesn't stand up properly."

That's pretty brutal, but Rogen wasn't done. He went on to suggest that the "creative minds" behind Dolittle knew that the project was a half-baked one when they sold the brass at Universal on the picture. He dished:

He added:

"I'll only say this because it was reported, and I'm going to tread lightly because I am close with many of the people involved, but I did that on the Dr. Dolittle film."

Rogen went on to explain that while the job of a script doctor is a relatively low-pressure one from a professional and creative standpoint, that shouldn't be taken to mean that those brought in to fix what maybe can't be fixed have no horse in the race at all. He explained that it's a pretty "cushy position to be in," adding:

On the other hand, though, the writer implied that on some projects, trying to wrangle the script into submission is akin to slapping a Band-Aid on the hull of the Titanic. Dolittle was such a project - and Universal pretty much knew it.

Rogen continued, saying,

"[Universal has] been very supportive of me and my career and made a lot of our movies, and I like the people who work there, so I genuinely want to make things better if I can. [But the studio was] having problems with the movie, and were calling in people to help kind of get to the bottom of it."

Robert Downey Jr. is one of the most charismatic actors of his generation; perhaps only he could have taken what was, in 2008, a C-list Marvel superhero and built not only a trilogy around him, but a mega-franchise destined to go down in history as the most ambitious cinematic undertakings ever. Even he, however, couldn't save Dolittle - the first project he took on after wrapping up his eleven-year run as Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - from collapsing all the way down to its ramshackle foundations.

Released in January 2020, well before the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theaters nationwide, Dolittle drew a dismal 14 percent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with critics lambasting every aspect of the production, from the photography to the editing to, yes, the writing, which was found to be full of lame potty humor in service of a meandering, borderline formless plot.

Even RDJ, a consummate professional, seemed to be phoning it in, perhaps aware that the only good thing to come out of this film was going to be his paycheck. Dolittle bombed at the box office, and deservedly so; it was one of the first true turkeys of 2020, and it appears that we now know why. It just wasn't built to be anything but. Watch the video to learn how Seth Rogen Admits This Robert Downey Jr. Movie Was A Scam!

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