Fresh off the presses, Universal/Comcast Corp. has confirmed the online "news" offered by Robert Downey Jr., by which he (presumably with the permission and/or collusion with the studio itself) dropped the entire voice cast for next year's Voyage of Doctor Dolittle. To wit, the live-action adaptation of Hugh Lofting's 1920's children's books, about a doctor who discovers that he can talk to the animals, will debut on April 12, 2019. That is essentially in the same slot where Walt Disney's The Jungle Book debuted in 2016.
That's fitting as you can make the case, relatively speaking, that the appeal for both projects is somewhat similar. Both films will be heavily sold via the notion of somewhat famous people voicing animals in what is technically a live-action flick. All due respect to Neel Sethi (who was wonderful in the Disney drama and should, I dunno, act more), Doctor Dolittle will have a movie star /famous person as its core human. The film's animal cast includes Emma Thompson, Craig Robinson, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Holland, Selena Gomez, Marion Cotillard, Octavia Spencer, Kumail Nanjiani, Rami Malek, John Cena, Carmen Ejogo and Frances De La Tour. The live-action actors will include Antonio Banderas (!), Michael Sheen, Harry Collett and Jim Broadbent.
Like Wicked, which may or may not still open on Dec. 20, 2019 (the same day as Star Wars Episode IX), this Doctor Dolittle revamp will be arguably something of an attempt by Universal to succeed in an arena where the Mouse House has had quite a bit of luck. Considering that Universal is arguably Disney's chief rival in the realm of theatrical distribution, there is a clear value of showing that they can do these kinds of live-action fairy tale/live-action family-friendly fantasies as well. At the risk of over-speculating, I would also imagine that Universal's fantasy flicks will be somewhat cheaper than the Disney variety, just as (for example) Illumination's animated toons cost about 1/2 to 1/3 of what Pixar's do. If that's the case, then The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle won't have to come anywhere near The Jungle Book to be a relative hit.
For what it's worth, the first Doctor Doolittle movie opened in 1967 where the Rex Harrison musical faced brutal competition from Walt Disney's animated The Jungle Book which had opened two months earlier and was still going strong (Hey, wait a minute...!). It was a pretty big flop for 20th Century Fox, earning $9 million domestic on a $17m budget. They had better luck in 1998 with Eddie Murphy's remake, which came right during his mid-1990's comeback run and earned a whopping $144m domestic/$294m worldwide that summer. Dr. Dolittle 2 is pretty bad, but it still made $176m (but on a $70m budget) in 2001. What's interesting is that Murphy's Dr. Dolittle movies is that they represented a turning point in Murphy's career, one that almost every comedian encounters, when they stop being a force of chaos and start being the reactor to said chaos.
Even though Downey Jr. has a specific star persona that arguably puts him at the center of the storm and the creator of narrative chaos, I would imagine this flick will have him mostly reacting to the animal comedy/madness that occurs all around him. That's not a criticism of either actor (Murphy is a wonderful and warmly empathetic straight man in the first Doctor Dolittle and Downey Jr. is himself a beautifully reactive performer), but it is something to consider as we wonder just what kind of movie this is going to be. Anyway, The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle opens April 12, 2019, and I'll once again restate that 2019 is going to be the busiest year in cinematic history, at least in terms of allegedly "big" movies.
