Early last year, a report came out revealing that Disney planned to turn its beloved 1990s franchise The Mighty Ducks into a TV series. Last November, word arrived that the show was being configured for the new streaming service Disney+, but things have been quiet since then. Now we finally have some news about the upcoming show, including a logline which lays out how this story will be slightly different than the movies that ’90s kids grew up watching.
/Film has received a pre-production breakdown of the half-hour series, which reveals that it will shoot in Vancouver from February 10, 2020 until June 1, 2020. Here’s the logline for the new series:
After getting kicked off the junior division Mighty Ducks team, a 13-year-old boy and his mom decide to start their own team, finding players, a coach, and a place to play.
That’s quite a diversion from the plot of the first movie, which features a hotshot lawyer being forced to coach a Pee-Wee team as punishment for a drunk driving incident. In the movie, coach Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez) gradually rediscovers his childhood love of the game of hockey and renames his ragtag team The Mighty Ducks, forming an underdog squad that eventually goes on to overcome the reigning champs of the league.
But it sounds like the Ducks are already an established team in the world of this show, and there’s no mention of Bombay specifically. In fact, no casting announcements have been made yet at all, so there’s still a chance Estevez could return to reprise his part, maybe stepping into the mentor role played by Hans (Joss Ackland) in the films. Joshua Jackson played the young Mighty Ducks player Charlie Conway in the movies and seemed to be following in Bombay’s footsteps, so I expected this show to take the Cobra Kai approach and have him slide into the new coach role. That could technically still happen – Jackson is currently filming a mini-series – but no word yet if that’s the direction they’re actually going to take here.
Interestingly, the earliest reports about this show suggested that original Mighty Ducks producer Jordan Kerner would be involved with this TV version, but his name is not on the official crew list. However, Steven Brill, who wrote all three Ducks films and produced both of the sequels, is still on board as an executive producer here. He’s joined by Josh Goldsmith, Cathy Yuspa, George Heller, and Brad Petrigala, who are all also executive producers.
Based on these shooting dates, the show could debut sometime in the second half of 2020, but Disney+ has yet to issue an official premiere date. Stay tuned for more Mighty Ducks news as we learn it.
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