I think RDJ is trying to channel Richard Burton in Welsh English
This movie looks ok but the CG looks unfinished, also I'm so sick of moody remixed trailer versions of songs, just get the original versions and be done with it!
But man why does this movie needs to be an EPIC? It's very unnecessary for a movie like this to have one.
Doesn't look bad, seems like a fine family adventure film.
Definitely sounds like the BTS drama is more interesting than the actual movie tho, (original) director sounds nuts lol
Heres the reddit posts for those who asked
Holy fuck that racist dog story, I swear Dr. Dotlittle as an IP is like a freaking curse in Hollywood, the original 1967 version is the one of the poster boys of a troubled production, I mean
look at this shit, at least the Eddie Murphy version didn't have nowhere near the amount of problems.
- 20th Century Fox, still reeling from the box office failure of Cleopatra, ran into serious trouble for the second time in four years with the 1967 family musical Doctor Dolittle, envisioned as a Follow the Leader title in the steps of My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, and The Sound of Music. The book Pictures at a Revolutiongoes into detail about problems that it ran into. The most of notable of them included the following:
- Following years of legal battles with Hugh Lofting's family, work on a Dolittle film finally began in 1964 with Alan Jay Lerner employed as scriptwriter and composer. When a year passed and Lerner had nothing to show for it, producer Arthur Jacobs fired him and tried unsuccessfully to entice The Sherman Brothers away from Disney before settling on English composer Leslie Bricusse, who took just two months to provide a full treatment complete with song ideas and tempering the racist content in a way that met with the Lofting family's approval. However, Bricusse unwittingly included an original scene from a rejected script by producer Helen Winston (assuming it was from the book), who sued Fox for $4.5 million. The case settled out of court, and the scene, in which Britain's animals go on strike in support of Dolittle, was only alluded to in the finished film.
- Rex Harrison, fresh from his star turn as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, was contracted to play the title character, but tried to back out after Lerner's dismissal. To do that, Harrison made ridiculous demands to piss off the producers like demanding that Sammy Davis Jr. be replaced with the non-singing actor Sidney Poitier, because he didn't want to work with an "entertainer" (Read: someone who could sing better than himself). He also demanded contradictory rewrites from Bricusse, made pointless explorations for new shooting locations and other songwriters (most notably, he looked into replacing Bricusse with Michael Flanders and Donald Swann), and wanted to record his songs live as opposed to standard sound recording in studio. Christopher Plummer, fresh from his star turn as Baron von Trapp in The Sound of Music, was paid $300,000 to stand by as Harrison's replacement during production. Harrison eventually returned, but was extremely difficult to work with during production, suffering various personal crises and constantly insulting and arguing with castmates, such as Anthony Newley for being Jewish, and crew members.
- Over 1,150 animals were trained for the film... in California. Because of British animal quarantine laws, they were unusable for location shooting at Castle Combe in Wiltshire, and another set of animals had to be trained at great expense. The animals proved almost as difficult to work with as Rex Harrison; a fawn drank from an open paint can and had to have her stomach pumped, a goat ate director Richard Fleischer's script, squirrels chewed through several key pieces of scenery, Rex Harrison was frequently urinated on by sheep while filming a field scene, a flock of ducks sank when placed in the water as the scene was shot at a time of year when their feathers were not water-repellent, several animal roles had to be repeatedly recast when the "actors" grew too large, some of the trainers got hepatitis from being bitten repeatedly, and the unexpected co-operation of the animals during the first take of "The Reluctant Vegetarian" was rendered irrelevant when Polynesia the Parrot shouted "Cut!" - and Harrison assumed it had been Fleischer who spoke.
- The location shoot in Castle Combe, posing as Dolittle's home village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, had other unexpected problems. Just as the weather reports the studio ignored warned, the rain fell in torrents all summer - except when the crew tried to film scenes set on rainy days. The film crew clashed with local residents when they insisted on the removal of their anachronistic television aerials, and an artificial dam built to enlarge the local lake was almost blown up by future explorer-adventurer Ranulph Fiennes, then a demolitions expert in the SAS, who saw the dam as an act of vandalism. Fiennes was dishonourably discharged from the SAS for improper use of explosives and fined a considerable sum for his act of "countervandalism".
- Filming moved to Marigot Bay in St. Lucia for the Sea-Star Island scenes, and the problems continued apace. The weather remained unco-operative, and there were frequent problems with swarms of local insects. A key scene in which Dolittle's companions leave the island on the Great Pink Sea Snail enraged the locals, the children among whom had just endured a food poisoning epidemic caused by freshwater snails, and they pelted the prop Snail with stones. Harrison deliberately ruined filming of a beach scene in which he was not involved by sailing his yacht into the shot and refusing to move. Studio sets had to be built in California for costly reshoots of the village and island scenes.
- As set decorator Stuart Reiss recalled in the book Pictures at a Revolution, the California sets had to be built on a slant so they could drain in case animals (such as cows or birds) made a mess. They also had laborers on standby with brooms, and all of the furniture had to be hosed down and washed every night. And there had to be duplicates of everything, even the walls, in case a big animal backed up into it or kicked it. Furthermore, the sets had the problem of a nasty stench resulting from animal waste and the gallons of ammonia used to clean them. To add to this, despite birds being tethered to railings, a few of them escaped and managed to get caught in the netting on the ceiling of the soundstages.
- Despite initial optimism from producer Arthur Jacobs (who had a heart attack during production), the final budget was a then-outrageously high $18 million ($136 million adjusted for modern inflation), three times original estimates. Preview audiences (which notably included very few children) and critics were unimpressed, and the film was a box-office bomb, earning just $9 million despite a merchandising blitz (nine different versions of the soundtrack were recorded, with a million records pressed, but they sold so poorly that they are often found in bargain bins to this day). It was ten years before another film, a space opera helmed by George Lucas, tried the merchandising angle again. Public opinion soured further when Fox essentially bribed their way to nine Oscar nominations (including Best Picture) by hosting lavish dinners and free screenings for Academy voters. It won two: Best Special Effects and Best Song for "Talk to the Animals".
- As well as ending Rex Harrison's career as a leading man, Dolittle is often credited, alongside Warner Bros.' Camelot (which came out two months earlier), with killing the family musical, as both opened to a negative critical reception and general lack of interest. Fox, already committed to releasing the similarly disappointing musicals Star! in 1968 and Hello, Dolly! in 1969, almost went bankrupt again, only making one film in 1970 and not recouping their losses until a 1973 re-release of The Sound of Music. The only good thing to come out of Doctor Dolittle was that Arthur Jacobs was able to make Fox greenlight, under promise of not exceeding a $5 million budget, a discredited Pierre Boulle-penned sci-fi story that he had been seeking to adapt for years... called Planet of the Apes.
