While many ‘Star Wars’ fans were keeping close tabs on the news coming out of Star Wars Celebration like the latest trailer for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’, some lucky fans were lucky enough to spend some time with the father of a galaxy far, far away thanks to the Tribeca Film Festival. On Friday, Stephen Colbert moderated a panel with George Lucas at the Borough of Manhattan Community College where the filmmaker spoke for an hour about how he got into the movie business, J.J. Abrams’ upcoming film set in the world that he created, and the media’s fascination with scathing reviews. On that note, the conversation went to some incredibly unexpected territory that involved a certain foul fowl from the Marvel Universe.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lucas candidly shared that he thinks Marvel Studios will reboot ‘Howard The Duck,’ the 1986 live-action film based on a talking duck produced by Lucasfilm. After acknowledging that it’s one of the worst reviewed films of all time, Lucas noted that films like that can “float up to the surface of the lake, and then they become cult classics.” That’s when he said that the House of Ideas could give it another go with Howard:
“Even ‘Howard the Duck’ is a cult classic. I have a feeling that Marvel’s gonna redo it because of the technology they have today. I told the producer and writer it’s not gonna work. You can’t put a dwarf in a duck suit and make it work! It’s a digital duck. When you have a digital duck, you can do anything. You can make it act.”
To be honest, it’s not an entirely farfetched idea. Last year, Howard appeared in the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ post-credits scene. Since then, he’s undergone a sort of resurgence thanks to Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones’ excellent comic series that sees Howard take the role of a New York City private investigator. Though director James Gunn has said on numerous occasions that the duck’s inclusion in the Collector’s collection was a last minute addition as a result of an offhand comment during post-production, anything is possible now that Howard has been introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (But I wouldn’t exactly hold my breath.)
Would you want to see a Howard the Duck solo film set in the MCU? Do you even think that we’ll see him again after his appearance after ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
