How Mighty Ducks the Movie Became Mighty Ducks the NHL Team All last week, we celebrated famous fake coaches from the best sports movies of all-time as part of Esquire Movie Coaches Week, during which you the readers picked Mr. Miyagi as the greatest coach in movie history. We got so motivated, in fact,Buy Authentic Jerseys that some of the stories spilled over to this week, including this surprising little tale of how a piece of fiction turned into reality. Sorta.
It's hard to remember now, when you see the black and metallic gold jerseys with orange accents, but the Anaheim Ducks of the National Hockey League were the very direct result of a movie's success. The Ducks have won a Stanley Cup. Five Hall of Famers have been Ducks at one point in their careers. Now in its 22nd season of play, the Ducks franchise has carved out an indelible place in the modern NHL. Of course, if The Mighty Ducks had bombed in theaters when it opened nationwide on Oct. 2, 1992, none of this would have happened. The San Francisco 49ers Jerseys would've looked elsewhere for expansion. Instead, the league awarded the Walt Disney Company an expansion team just 69 days after the opening of a children's movie. The film accumulated a North American box office of around $50 million, which was the fee that NHL required for a new team. Even back then, $50 million was couch change for Michael Eisner and the Mickey Mouse crowd, but you could say the Mighty Ducks movie essentially paid for the Mighty Ducks hockey team. So was this pure marketing serendipity or an Eisner-hatched master plan to coordinate cinematic and athletic effort in some unholy corporate synergy? Well, it's a little bit of both, but it skews slightly toward the former. In this chicken-or-egg case, the movie—written by a mid-20s writer named Steve Brill (no, not the one you're thinking of)—started out as a spec script without a home until Eisner picked it up, feeling the time was simply right for Disney to do a hockey movie. Then, in 1992, as the movie was well underway and close to completion, Eisner was prodded by a close acquaintance, Bruce McNall,Seattle Seahawks Jerseys then the owner of the Los Angeles Kings, to get in on the NHL's expansion effort. Blockbuster Video CEO Wayne Huizenga was putting a team in South Florida (the future Florida Panthers) and maybe Eisner should do the same for Anaheim? (McNall had his own ulterior motive, as he would receive half of Disney's $50 million franchise fee to amicably split the territorial rights.)
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