Emilio Estevez still so mad about The Mighty Ducks that he wrote his own

Estevez says he wrote his Mighty Ducks script to "make up for all the disasters that happened on the Game Changers series."

By William Hughes  |  April 19, 2025 | 4:59pm
Emilio Estevez as Gordon Bombay, Photo: Disney/Nino Munoz
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Emilio Estevez’s estrangement from the Mighty Ducks franchise was not an especially happy one. After begrudgingly agreeing to return to the franchise for early Disney+ series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers—one of those shows from that first era of the Disney streaming service, where it literally seemed to have no ideas except “Remember, please, when you and the world were young”—Estevez was just as unhappy to find himself removed from the series over a “contract dispute” with Disney in between its first and second seasons. (This is all still a little nebulous; Disney said the actor refused to agree to abide by COVID safety protocols; Estevez says he was extremely safety conscious around the disease but was “anti-bully,” while also highlighting creative differences with the show’s creators.) And so, Estevez did what anyone would do in this situation: He wrote his own dang Mighty Ducks movie, with roller derby, and women’s hockey.

This is per an interview Estevez recently gave to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, revealing that he wrote a full script for a fourth Mighty Ducks movie a few years ago, during the 2023 strikes, to “make up for all the disasters that happened on the Game Changers series.” (Which, he notes in an earlier portion of the interview, he had to be dragged “kicking and screaming” both into, and then out of.) The Estevez script would see Gordon Bombay coaching a roller derby team, only to be approached to lead an expansion team for the Professional Women’s Hockey League. “And so he says, ‘My girls are coming with me. They have to get a shot.'” Which, we’ll be honest: Not the world’s worst idea for a sports movie, even if it seems like it loses the fairly important teen angle of the whole Mighty Ducks franchise. Estevez says he offered the script to Disney, but, wouldn’t you know it, no dice.

Not that Mighty Ducks is the only franchise Estevez’s pen has re-visited in recent years: He says he’s also written a spec script for a sequel to Maximum Overdrive, the infamously bad Stephen King directorial effort about machines taking their ’80s-style vengeance on the human race. Does Estevez’s self-described “bitchin'” script involve Guy Fieri? We are excited to report to you that it absolutely does. (The inheritors of producer Dino de Laurentiis, who own the rights to Maximum Overdrive, were not enthused, despite its obviously potential to be, in Fieri-speak both “money” and “bomb-dot-com.”)

Estevez, who’s directed and written a number of TV shows and films over the years, does have at least one revival project in the works that sounds like it does have a chance of at least going into production: Young Guns 3, which he says he’s just started casting on, with Lou Diamond Phillips and Christian Slater both supposedly set to return.

 

 
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