Is 'Howard the Duck' the Next Marvel Star? George Lucas Thinks So

George Lucas thinks Howard the Duck may be the next to get a big-screen reboot.

During Friday's Tribeca Film Festival discussion, moderated by Stephen Colbert, the filmmaker had spoken candidly about Hollywood's corporate culture and the media's habit of publishing scathing reviews.

He noted how even the worst reviewed films can "float up to the surface of the lake, and then they become cult classics. … It means you made an interesting movie or a weird movie, and a small group of people love it."

"Even Howard the Duck is a cult classic," he said, triggering applause in the Borough of Manhattan Community College theater. "I have a feeling that Marvel's gonna redo it because of the technology they have today."

He said of the original 1986 film, "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!"

Colbert mentioned how the character is seen as an Easter egg at the very end of Guardians of the Galaxy. James Gunn has said that the character's appearance was the result of an offhand comment by the movie's editor during postproduction. "We decided to do it very late in the game, only a couple of months [before release], and we had to design Howard that day," he told Empire.

Marvel's publishing arm certainly took note of the character's popularity in the final movie, launching a new comic book series centered around the character earlier this year.

Lucas said of the appearance in the 2014 hit: "It's a digital duck. When you have a digital duck, you can do anything. You can make it act."

James Gunn Reveals His Dislike of 1986's 'Howard the Duck': "That Movie Sucks"



Writer/director James Gunn planted an homage to one of his favorite Marvel characters, Howard the Duck, in the after-credits scene in 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy.

That appearance of the avian comic character was not his first on film, however, as Howard the Duck starred in his own feature length film in 1986 from Lucasfilm. The film was a notorious flop and, even worse, riled up fans of the character who felt his representation on the big screen was nothing like how he appeared on the page.

One such disappointed fan was a young Gunn, who opened up about his experience seeing the film for the first time in a recent interview with Yahoo Movies. "I was young and I went so excited about it," Gunn recalled, only to immediately describe his distaste for the movie. "That movie sucks!” he said. “That movie’s terrible!”

“I wasn’t hip with the Caucasian eyelids," Gunn continued, recalling the bizarre prosthetic work used to create the character onscreen. "That upset me because they had the puppet, and it was a duck, and instead of having feathery or white eyelids, he had Caucasian eyelids and it was creepy.”

Gunn created a bit of a stir when fans caught a glimpse of the character, fully rendered in CGI, at the end of Guardians, sipping a cocktail while cracking wise with Benicio Del Toro's Collector character. Rumors immediately circulated of a reboot for the much-beloved Marvel character, one that Gunn himself considers one of his favorites.

"I’m a huge Howard the Duck fan,” Gunn said. “For people who don’t know, I’m a huge Marvel Comics fan, but Howard the Duck was maybe my favorite character as a kid. I went back and I collected all of those comics, I had every comic he was ever in.”

Is a James Gunn-directed feature film centered around the character coming down the pipeline? No word from Gunn, but given his recent success making a blockbuster franchise out of Marvel's lesser-known Guardians of the Galaxy, and his apparent hatred of the '80s film, never say never.