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Kenan Thompson played Russ Tyler in the second and third Mighty Ducks moviesThompson, 47, developed a love for the NHL while making the films and recently took in an Anaheim Ducks gameThe actor flashed the script for Mighty Ducks 4, something that fellow alum Emilio Estevez has said Disney has passed on
Once a duck, always a duck!
Kenan Thompson spent the day cheering on the Anaheim Ducks on Sunday, Feb. 1. The comedian, 47, who starred in D2: The Mighty Ducks and D3: The Mighty Ducks, was there to honor Ducks forward Alex Killorn, who was playing in his 1,000th NHL game.
Wearing a “Tyler” jersey in honor of his character, Russ Tyler, Thompson flashed a Mighty Ducks 4 script at the camera.
Later, he led the stadium in a good quack, sharing video of the moment on Instagram, where he wrote, “It’s good to be home. 🏒🥅 That game sure was MIGHTY!!!! GO DUCKS!!!!👏🏾🙌🏾”
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Thompson credited his time making the Mighty Ducks movies with sparking his own interest in hockey during a 2022 interview with ESPN. Disney even founded the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks in the 1990s after making the first Mighty Ducks film.
“It’s always been super-duper love. Hockey fans can get a little rowdy after the game and stuff, but they just want to shout out The Mighty Ducks and tell me how much they meant to them, how it kept them motivated on their hockey paths,” Thompson told the outlet at the time. “It’s always been a lot of love.”
As for Mighty Ducks 4, Emilio Estevez revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in April 2025 that he wrote a script, but Disney wasn’t interested.
“I also wrote Mighty Ducks 4. I wanted to make up for all of the disasters that happened on the Game Changers series,” Estevez said.
The actor, 63, appeared in the original Mighty Ducks trilogy as coach Gordon Bombay, reprising the role in the 2021 Disney+ series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers. He didn’t appear in the show’s second and final season after clashing with production over the vaccine requirement on set.
Of the script, Estevez shared, “[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 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,’ ” he continued, adding, “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.’ ”