(Photo by: Disney+)
The team has been benched. Disney+ has cancelled The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers series so viewers won’t be seeing a third season.
A comedy-drama continuation of the 1990s movies, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers TV show was developed by film creator Steve Brill, Josh Goldsmith, and Cathy Yuspa. The show stars Lauren Graham, Emilio Estevez, Josh Duhamel, Brady Noon, Maxwell Simkins, Swayam Bhatia, Julee Cerda, Luke Islam, Bella Higginbotham, Taegen Burns, Kiefer O’Reilly, De’Jon Watts, Naveen Paddock, and Josh Duhamel. Set in present-day Minnesota, the Mighty Ducks youth hockey team has evolved from scrappy underdogs to an ultra-competitive, powerhouse team. After 12-year-old Evan Morrow (Noon) is unceremoniously cut from the Ducks, he and his mom, Alex (Graham), and friend Nick Gaines (Simkins) set out to build their own team of misfits — to challenge the cutthroat, win-at-all-costs culture of youth sports today. With the help of the Ducks’ original coach, Gordon Bombay (Estevez), they rediscover the joys of playing just for love of the game.
The show premiered in March 2021 and was renewed for a second season in August of that year. In November, it was revealed that Estevez’s second-season option wasn’t picked up due to creative differences and a contract dispute. A month later, Duhamel joined the cast. The second season launched last September, a year and a half after the first season’s premiere.
The cancellation isn’t a big surprise as the series wasn’t a big hit for Disney+. Also, sports shows are expensive because they are complicated and difficult to film.
Peter Rice was a big champion for the series. However, the former Chairman of Disney General Entertainment Content for The Walt Disney Company, was fired in June despite having recently renewed his contract through 2024. The Wall Street Journal reported:
A senior Disney official cited Mr. Rice’s decision to renew two struggling shows on the Disney+ streaming service — The Mighty Ducks and Big Shot — as examples of questionable deal-making. Both shows cost more than $50 million and neither had shown the type of success that merited additional seasons, this official said.
But people familiar with Mr. Rice’s thinking countered that the shows were renewed in part because the Covid-19 pandemic had made it challenging to develop and produce new programming and both were well reviewed.
Also, Mr. Rice believed there wasn’t enough stability on the platform and it was important to have some consistency so viewers wouldn’t get frustrated at series coming and going, they said.
Big Shot has also been cancelled after two seasons.
What do you think? Did you enjoy the Mighty Ducks TV series? Are you disappointed that this Disney+ show won’t get a third season?