Emilio Estevez hopes to take another “quack” at The Mighty Ducks. The actor played lawyer turned Pee-Wee hockey Coach Gordon Bombay in the Mighty Ducks trilogy between 1992 and 1996, a role he reprised in the first season of the since-canceled Disney+ series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers in 2021. The season 1 “Spirit of the Ducks” episode featured a mini Ducks reunion on and off the ice — with slap shot stud Fulton (Elden Henson), Hawks-turned-Ducks player Adam Banks (Vinny La Russo), and forwards Les (Matt Doherty), Kenny (Justin Wong), Connie (Marguerite Moreau), and Guy (Garette Ratliff Henson) — but as it turns out, Estevez hoped to see two more Ducks flock back to the rink.
“I wrote The Mighty Ducks 4. I wanted to make up for all of the disasters that happened on the Game Changers series,” Estevez said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. Estevez went on to reveal that his feature script had Coach Bombay “being pulled back in” by two of his former players: Joshua Jackson’s Charlie “Spaz-way” Conway from all three Mighty Ducks movies and Kenan Thompson’s Russ Tyler (who made his film debut in 1994’s D2: The Mighty Ducks).
Conway and Tyler would recruit Bombay to coach an expansion team for the Professional Women’s Hockey League, making the new Mighty Ducks “an all-girl team,” Estevez said.
“When we discover Bombay, he’s coaching roller derby,” Estevez explained. “And so he says, ‘My girls are going with me. They have to have a shot.’”
Estevez described his unmade Mighty Ducks 4 script as “charming, and contemporary, and cool, and organically of the moment. Disney was like, ‘We don’t want to pursue that.’”
In 2021, it was reported that Disney Television Studios’ ABC Signature, which produced the Mighty Ducks TV series, opted not to renew Estevez’s option for a second season as a result of his dispute over the show’s COVID vaccination requirement. Days after his exit from the series, Estevez issued a statement in which he said he “is not anti-vaxx” and that it was a “good old fashioned contract dispute” and “a myriad of creative differences” that led to Coach Bombay being benched from the Ducks.
Disney removed all episodes of The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers and more low-performing reboots — including the Cheaper by the Dozen remake and the Turner & Hooch and Willow TV series — as part of a Disney+ and Hulu content purge in May 2023. However, The Mighty Ducks (1992), D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994), D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996), and Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series (1996) remain available to stream on Disney+.
The post Emilio Estevez Reveals He Wrote a Mighty Ducks 4 Script With the Original Cast (and Why It Never Got Made) appeared first on ComicBook.com.
