Howard The Duck (1986)

Howard the Duck paved the way on how late 20th century Hollywood gaged comic book adapted movies. Its not the first adapted film to hit the big screen, but from a creative stance it makes all the difference in the world.

 During the early 1990's when Marvel Comics was in financial turmoil, they were willing to sell all there  film distribution rights of all there characters to Sony Pictures for 25 Million dollars. At that time Sony believed the only character worth any film value to be shown theatrically was Spiderman and purchased the film rights for only 10 Million Dollars.  In hindsight that deal was horrible for both sides, overtime to inject a cash flow, Marvel granted distribution rights to varied characters to different companies, like Fox owning the X-men and The Fantastic-4, Paramount owning the Hulk,  Sony Pictures having Spiderman and all the Spider-verse characters. For it's deal Sony Pictures made back 10 times the purchase cost of the first Spiderman movie, which still saw a massive profit after the film's budget of $7 million dollars , and the cost for marketing and payment to the National Assoc. of Theatre Owners (NATO), Sony made $114 Million on its opening day weekend which at that time was the highest box office gross for any film in history. and gave an instant profit of $50+ million after expenses were paid out. Spiderman (2002) made just over $403 Million Domestically and more than double that worldwide. So of course the sequel would be in the works and possible a trilogy, if lightning in the bottle would catch twice the company would jump on that without a second thought.

Go back 16 years before the release of Spiderman, which was 3 years after the release of Return of the Jedi. George Lucas and his company Lucas films purchased the film rights to Howard the Duck, a Marvel Comic intellectual property and made it into a feature length theatrical motion picture .  And Marvel's first film ever to hit the big screen.  In short, the film was a commercial failure for a film with a budget of $30 Million ($76 million today with inflation) only made back $38 Million Worldwide, meaning after all expenses, the film never made a profit, it was in the red, George Lucas was was still the process of building Skywalker ranch and had to sell off parts of his company to payback the banks. The most notable sale was a small animation company he sold to Steve Jobs the CEO of Apple. that company would go on to becoming the multiple award winning animation company Pixar films. 

For nearly 30 years Howard the Duck was remembered as disaster of a movie Critics and audiences did not connect with this film , on a revisit - Rotten tomatoes scored this film 15%.  This in turn made investor uneasy to invest large sums of money into a comic book genre film,  A decade later Blade received mixed critical reviews but connected with the audience and in the 2000's  investors saw value in telling these character stories with the debut of X-men,  Batman, Spiderman these films had a more modest/ limited budget in the beginning and saw great commercial success, Daredevil, Elektra, Ghost Rider, Sin City saw a split of public and critical opinion but proved this was a fertile ground to harvest.

Howard the Duck ridiculed notoriety did not taint it's cast.  Tim Robbins, is all but forgotten that this was his breakthrough role, Jeffrey Jones later that year was distinctly remembered for his role playing principal Ed Rooney in Ferris Buller and would go onto be a character actor in about 70 film.  The leading star Lea Thompson, was a household name with the release of Back to the Future, and continues with developing a list of films under her belt,  as both an Actor and Television Director, but never reached that  commanding leading lady role in Hollywood.  As for the actor Ed Gale the man in the Howard the Duck suit, he continued to work as a stunt man for another decade, and would appear in over over 100 Television shows and commercials. 

Howard the Duck would make his return to the big screen 28 years later in a small cameo appearance in the post credit scene of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) movie. The character and his movie has slowly built a cult following and Disney's Marvel Studios of  today has future plans for this character who in his 1986 theatrical release gave us the first notion of a multi-verse.  

What If (2021) series