Posted in: Disney+, TV | Tagged: The Mighty Ducks

The Mighty Ducks: Estevez Pitched New Film After Series "Disasters"

While taking a shot at the Disney+ series, The Mighty Ducks star Emilio Estevez revealed he's written a new movie for the legacy cast.

If it were up to Emilio Estevez, The Mighty Ducks would have remained a cinematic franchise, revealing he wrote a spec script for a fourth movie on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. The actor, who played the lawyer-turned-youth hockey coach Gordon Bombay, appeared in the 1992 original, and its 1992 sequel before D3, the third and final of the trilogy, shifted focus to Joshua Jackson's Charlie Conway, Gordon's protégé with Jeffrey Nordling playing Ted Orion, picked by Gordon to take over coaching the Ducks. Franchise stars Garette Ratliff Henson, Marguerite Moreau, Elden Henson, Matt Doherty, Vincent Larusso, and D3's Justin Wong would make cameos in the Disney+ legacy sequel series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers. Estevez left the series in the series' second and final season after creative differences.

The Mighty Ducks 4: Emilio Estevez on the Sequel That Wasn't

"I also wrote 'Mighty Ducks 4,'" Estevez told host Josh Horowitz. "I wanted to make up for all of the disasters that happened on the 'Game Changers' series." The actor elaborated on the sequel he pitched to Disney. "[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 (Russ Tyler), 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.'"

In The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, Estevez was a supporting character rather than the lead he was in the first two films, as Gordon's love for hockey is reignited after seeing a new underdog team, the "Don't Bothers", play at the Ice Palace, a rink he owns. Estevez's departure from Game Changers was controversial, with a series producer writing in a statement that they "made the decision not to pick up Estevez's option for Season 2 after weeks of back and forth with his team over the show's Covid vaccination requirement." The actor pushed back with a statement of his own, "I am not anti-vaxx. Full stop. I take this pandemic very seriously, and I am often teased about my continued following of the safety protocols and my abundance of caution" calling his departure due to "nothing more than a good old-fashioned contract dispute" and citing a "myriad of creative differences."

The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, which also stars Lauren Graham, Brady Noon, Maxwell Simkins, Swayam Bhatia, Taegen Burns, Luke Islam, Bella Higginbotham, Kiefer O'Reilly, Dylan Playfair, Julee Cerda, Josh Duhamel, and Naveen Paddock is NOT available on Disney+, because like Estevez, Disney wants you to forget the series existed, too since it was part of the streamer's content purge. For more on Estevez's career, including The Breakfast Club (1985) reunion and upcoming Young Guns 3, you can check out the video.

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