The verdict is in on Robert Downey Jr’s Dolittle, and it is not kind. After dismal reviews in the US, this £135 million, effects-laden reboot is predicted to lose £75 million for Universal – the studio’s second animal-themed bomb in as many months, after Cats.

Of all the fateful decisions they got wrong attempting this latest version of Hugh Lofting’s children’s books, one should have been obvious. Would they go down the route of Eddie Murphy’s Dr Dolittle (1998) – a breezy, if basic, present-day romp which had nothing to do with Lofting beyond the name and talks-to-the-animals concept, and made $300 million (£230 million)? Or would they go full period with Lofting’s menagerie, cast Downey as a dandyish Victorian vet with a bizarre Welsh accent, and hope for the best?

Staring them in the face were the lessons of the last, exorbitantly budgeted attempt at a faithful film adaptation of Dolittle’s globe-trotting adventures – a feature so calamitous it nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox in 1967. This is the version in which Rex Harrison rode a giraffe, tried to act opposite a drunken squirrel, and half-talked, half-sang a dewy-eyed love ballad to a seal in a straw hat. Every element of this Doctor Dolittle is an object lesson in blockbuster chaos, so much so that the story of its making should be required reading for studio executives.

A large-scale musical based on Lofting’s books was the brainchild of producer Arthur P Jacobs, who would wind up having a heart attack during this runaway train of a project. The pressures were huge: Fox had only just recovered from its last white elephant – 1963’s Cleopatra, co-starring Harrison as Julius Caesar – and was still climbing out of the deep financial hole that film had left behind.

Fox’s salvation – the biggest hit of its day – was The Sound of Music (1965), which came at the perfect time to cash in on a wave of lavish musicals, right after the successes of My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins (both 1964). Doctor Dolittle, inflated by design so that it could run, like these, with an intermission, was by no means the only attempt to keep this doomed bandwagon clattering along, but like Camelot (1967) just before it, and both Star! (1968) and Hello, Dolly! (1969) afterwards, it wound up costing a fortune and being liked by almost no one.