To most people, the Mighty Ducks conjures up images of a commercially successful trilogy of Disney movies about a rag-tag bunch of hockey-playing kids that spawned a real-life NHL hockey club owned by the mouse-eared studio. But the feel-good films and their genuine ice-skating progeny have also spawned a frosty lawsuit that’s come to be known in entertainment law circles as “the mighty bucks.”
And that’s precisely what screenwriter Steven Brill — along with a number of his Hollywood colleagues — is hoping to get out of it. Brill, who wrote the original Mighty Ducks film and two sequels, has aimed a legal hockey puck right at Disney’s padded pocketbook. At the moment, depositions are being taken in Brill’s Los Angeles federal suit, which claims Disney profited immensely from his labors without sharing any of the profits.
