There's a new Mighty Ducks movie just waiting to be made by the original star, too! Too bad Disney doesn't want to make it!
The Mighty Ducks may be one of the odder franchises in Disney history. It all started with 1992's movie of the same name starring Emilio Estevez as Gordon Bombay, a cocky hotshot lawyer. After a DUI arrest, Gordon is forced to do community service coaching a junior hockey league.
Gordon hates this as he's loathed hockey ever since he failed to score a winning goal in a championship game when he was a kid. It's not helped that the team (who he nicknames the Ducks) is the worst in the league.
Slowly but surely, Gordon builds these misfits (which included a young Joshua Jackson) into a team that ends up winning the championship. Released in October of 1992, the movie turned into a sleeper success with a $50 million box office take against its low budget.
Naturally, a sequel followed, 1994's D2: The Mighty Ducks, where Gordon takes the Ducks to an international championship. In 1996, D3 had the Ducks attend a prestigious academy with a new coach, and Estevez only made a cameo appearance.
The movie's success had some unexpected offshoots. First, an animated series took the nutty idea of a band of duck-like aliens coming to Earth and fighting aliens while also playing hockey.
Wilder was that in 1993, The Ducks became an actual NHL team based in Anaheim. The team continues to play from that city with a Stanley Cup victory in 2007.
After D3's disappointing box office, the series seemed to end…for a time.
The short-lived Game Changers
In 2018, as the wave of "sequel reboots" began hitting, ABC started to develop a TV show based on the movies. It was soon picked up for the launching Disney+ and The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers premiered in March of 2021.
The show had the intriguing premise that the Ducks had turned into exactly the team they'd once fought: A multiple State Championship squad that constantly got better equipment, attention, and support than smaller squads and the players an arrogant bunch.
Lauren Graham played a mother upset that the Ducks cut her son as he doesn't meet their "criteria." He decides to form his own team, and she reaches out to Gordon (played once more by Estevez), who had become despondent seeing what his team had turned into and running an ice rink.
The first season did well with viewers and critics, ending with the new team taking back the Ducks name. Disney+ renewed it for a second year only to announce Estevez would not be back.
The reasons vary depending on who you talk to. While contract negotiations were blamed, there were also accusations Estevez refused to supply proof he was vaccinated while season 1 was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The actor has denied that and hinted at on-set conflicts with the creators.
This necessitated a change for season 2, with Gordon focusing on saving his ice rink while the Ducks attended a hockey camp with Josh Duhamel as the new lead. Disney canceled the show at the end of its second season, and it was among the many shows culled from the streamer in 2023 in a cost-cutting measure.
Well, it appears that Estevez was so upset about the end of the Ducks franchise that he went ahead and wrote a new movie about it!
What is Mighty Ducks 4 about?
Speaking to Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, Estevez wasn't exactly cordial about Game Changers, claiming he had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to do it and then to be kicked out of it. He then revealed he'd written a script for a fourth movie to "make up for the disasters that happened" with Game Changers.
"[It's] a feature script that had coach Bombay coming back, being pulled back in by Joshua Jackson's character and Kenan Thompson's character and to coach a new team, an expansion team, for the professional women's hockey league. So, it would be an all-girl team. Now, when we discover Bombay, he's coaching roller derby and so he says, 'My girls are going with me. They have to have a shot.' It was charming and contemporary and cool and organically of the moment. It's where we're at.. Disney was like, 'We don't want to pursue that.'"
It's actually not a bad idea for a Ducks revival. It would touch on the rise of women's hockey and make sense that Jackson's Charlie and Thompson's Russ (who debuted in D2) would still be into the team. A first-season episode of Game Changers had several of the movie characters returning, but due to the pandemic restrictions, Jackson was unable to take part. Likewise, Thompson is now a featured star of Saturday Night Live and couldn't fit a cameo into his schedule.
Disney passing on it is funny, given the company has been into a lot of sequels and reboots like the upcoming Freakier Friday. The female-oriented storyline could also appeal to audiences and serve, if not as a full movie, as the basis for another show.
It could be that Disney still has some bad blood with Estevez over his exit from the series and how the actor has bad-mouthed the company since then. This is too bad, as Game Changers was one of the better series that Disney+ culled from the streamer and deserved more attention.
It would be impossible for Estevez to make this movie on his own, as Disney owns all the rights to the Mighty Ducks franchise. Yet there's hope that somehow, someway, the Ducks fly again to continue this quite interesting property.
The Mighty Ducks films streaming on Disney+.