Now that the opening weekend box office numbers for Dolittle are in, the results paint anything but a rosy picture for the sadly beleaguered reboot. In its opening three days, Dolittle has pulled in a domestic total of $22.5 million. International numbers put its current gross at $57 million, with Dolittle projected to finish the Martin Luther King Day four-day weekend with $30 million as its domestic tally. Given the movie's gargantuan $175 million budget, Dolittle needed to generate ticket sales on the level of a summer or holiday season blockbuster in order to break even or turn a profit - which definitely won't happen now.
Universal Pictures clearly had a lot riding on Dolittle. Aside from its massive budget, the movie went through major reshoots, adding an additional two directors - Chris McKay and Jonathan Liebesman - in varying capacities to try and punch up the movie. Whatever reasoning there may have been behind restructuring the movie, it has sadly proven to be in vain.
Following the calamitous performance of 2019's Cats (which itself saw its own last-minute tinkering well after the ship had sailed on any further post-production work), Dolittle will unfortunately mark the second big talking animal movie flop from Universal Pictures in less than a month. As the opening act of Robert Downey Jr.'s post-Marvel career, all parties involved were doubtlessly hoping for far better results, but several factors ultimately contributed to Dolittle's box office doom. Here are the reasons why Dolittle bombed at the box office.
Dolittle's Budget Was Far Too Big
By far the biggest contributing factor to Dolittle's failure lies in the movie's enormous $175 million budget. Given its opening weekend numbers, the sad reality is that Universal vastly overspent on Dolittle, seriously overestimating the movie's prospects for success. The original Doctor Dolittle movie adaptation was itself an infamous bomb in 1967, and while the Eddie Murphy-led reboot movies of the '90s and early 2000s were successes in their own time, neither was the kind of runaway hit to justify an investment on the magnitude of Dolittle, with the series moving into direct-to-DVD territory by its third installment.
Dolittle's downfall mirrors films such as John Carter and The Lone Ranger. Like Dolittle, both were the product of a studio pulling an old IP off the shelf and giving them an astronomical budget with an unrealistically optimistic expectation of success. As a result, they are among the biggest box office flops in cinematic history. The fact of the matter is that not every adaptation of a classic children's story can join the billion-dollar club, but they do have the potential to succeed with a more modest budget. Had Dolittle been budgeted more along the lines of the $90 million price tag of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (which is arguably the poster child for how to revive a long-dormant franchise), it would have had a chance to at least break even. As it stands, Dolittle is just the latest example of a studio placing excessive expectations on a property that no one was really clamoring to see.
Dolittle's Reviews Are Terrible
Compounding matters is the fact that the reviews Dolittle has received have been anything but rapturous. As of this writing, Dolittle holds an 18% score on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus reading "Dolittle may be enough to entertain very young viewers, but they deserve better than this rote adaptation's jumbled story and stale humor." Many take issue with the movie's unfocused tone and general lack of focus, with Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal calling it, "A production that achieves the dubious distinction of combining too-muchness with not-enoughness", while CNN's Brian Lowry calls the movie "a conspicuous waste of time and, given the special effects, what looks like a ridiculous amount of money."
Even many of its more positive reviews aren't exactly glowing. Screen Rant's own Molly Freeman describes Downey Jr.'s performance in the title role as "bizarre, but entertaining," while noting that "it doesn't much elevate this generic family-friendly adventure." Meanwhile, Peter Gray of The AU Review says that it's "not the cinematic car-crash it very easily could have been" in comparison to Cats - not exactly high praise given that movie's horrendous reception. Taken together, the reviews for Dolittle have done little to instill confidence in moviegoers that the movie will be a wise investment of their time and money and have likely repelled many audience members who were on the fence about seeing it.
Dolittle Got Dumped In A January Release Date
On top of the other obstacles it was already facing, Dolittle's shifting release date also did the movie considerable harm. Dolittle was originally scheduled to release on May 24th, 2019, before being rescheduled to April 12th to avoid competition with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (at the time slated to be released on the same day). When that movie was pushed back to December 20th, Dolittle was again moved to January 17th, 2020. To be fair, the release of Avengers: Endgame on April 26th, along with Robert Downey Jr.'s involvement in both movies, clearly made vacating the month of April a smart move for Dolittle, but its move to January traded one problem for another.
January is a notorious dead zone for moviegoing, with the month's most buzzed about films typically being holiday season holdovers and awards season contenders expanding into wide release (as seen in the recent expansion of 1917.) Otherwise, January is traditionally seen as the month where studios offload the movies in which they have little to no confidence. In general, horror movies tend to be the only genre to see significant box office prospects among newly released films in the first month of the year, as seen with such January hits as 2008's Cloverfield and 2013's Mama. Furthermore, while the newly released Bad Boys For Life and the aforementioned 1917 are both doing solid business, both have the benefit of being far more positively received. Generally speaking, January simply doesn't provide fertile enough ground for the kind of box office grand slam that a $175 million budget demands. By planting its flag in January, Dolittle effectively positioned itself as movie in which its studio has no faith.
When all is said and done, the failure of Dolittle can be attributed to a perfect storm of bad reviews, a release window during the slowest month of the year, and an out-of-control budget on an IP ill-suited for blockbuster numbers, with the latter especially proving to be the biggest nail in the coffin. Any plans there may have been for further Doctor Dolittle movies are now very likely to go unrealized. However, should the good doctor ever make another return to cinema screens, we can only hope that his next adventure manages to avoid the regrettable mistakes made by Dolittle.