Robert Downey Jr. Believes ‘Dolittle’ and ‘The Shaggy Dog’ Are The “Most Important” Movies He’s Made in Last 25 Years — but Not for the Reasons You Think

Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, it is almost impossible for both MCU fans and newbies alike not to associate Robert Downey Jr. with the infamous Tony Stark and his bionic alter-ego. However, the man in the red and gold suit does not believe his Marvel films to be as key for his career as others.

In a Friday (July 7) interview with The New York Times Magazine, Downey Jr. reflected on his acting credentials and some of his other films outside of the MCU.

“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,” Downey Jr. said. “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,” he continued, “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.”

According to Variety, Downey Jr. was convicted of drug and weapon possession in 1996, ten years prior to the release of The Shaggy Dog. The film, which starred Tim Allen and Kristen Davis, was meaningful to Downey Jr. because it meant a major studio like Disney (who would eventually bring him on as Iron Man) would hire him, as his career had taken a turn after his conviction made headlines. He was later pardoned in 2015.

Downey Jr. produced Dolittle with his wife, Susan Downey, under Team Downey Productions, which has produced HBO‘s Perry Mason and The Judge. While the movie was deemed a flop at the box office and has a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, Downey Jr. considered it a push toward his “reset of priorities.”

“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,” he shared.

He continued to deem The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Sr., the documentary he made about his late father Robert Downey Sr. as he was dying, “a piece of content,” one which although personal to him, “was a piece of content that [everyone else] 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,” he continued.

As for his other films, he called Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Back to School “not content,” while he believed U.S. Marshals is “debatable.”

Downey Jr. launched Downey’s Dream Cars last month, a new Max series in which he modifies the vintage cars from his vast collection to make them more eco-friendly.

If that series isn’t in your lane, you can catch Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer, which premieres in theaters July 21.