Light your prayer candles, start making wishes, and commence your personal V-formations: It’s time to vaguely imagine a fourth Mighty Ducks movie. Joshua Jackson himself would be down, he says. He tells Time:
I feel like a fourth film should happen, and if there was space for any of the original kids that come back and have a role, I would be surprised that anybody didn’t want to do it, The next generation should have its own version. Not that we need to come back as adults, but I hope my kids grow up and play pickup hockey and I hope that they have their own movies like my generation had those movies. In that way, yeah, of course, I’d be a part of something like that.
This is hardly the first time an additional installment has been considered. Back in the day, producer Jordan Kerner had a pretty serious idea for what a fourth movie might entail. Kerner says in the same article,
I wanted to license this dark adult play, That Championship Season. It was going to be the death of Gordon Bombay as an older man, and Marty [Sheen] was going to play him. And Goldberg would be played by like Jim Belushi. You know, we were literally going to pair up everybody with a present-day actor, but it was going to be not unlike Chariots of Fire, the sort of look back at a moment in time when their coach came back to them and did something that changed their lives forever. So you cut from the present of the kids and they would have been all of 18 or 19, so they would have become the high school seniors… But it would be set against this thing going on in a bar or restaurant where all the present-day guys grown up talking about what this coach meant to them. And we’d see that played out against them as 18-year-olds on the ice and Emilio playing in that and his father playing in a series of scenes where he was dying and they had to say their goodbyes. So I was looking for a really literate and emotional way for all of them to come back together again as men and to say goodbye to the man who meant so much to them. But it wasn’t meant to be.
The Mighty Ducks 4: We’re All Going to Die Someday never came to be, and neither did a Broadway musical version that Kerner and writer Steve Brill discussed. Perhaps the time is now? “I’m not going to fuel the rumor mill that it’s going to happen,” Kerner says, “but I’m saying to you that the studio said to us, ‘We’d be interested if you come to us with the right story.’ And that’s something that we’ve been all thinking about independently and I think that we may be coming closer to having the right idea for that.” Quack. Quack. Quack.
