Forty years after Howard the Duck opened in theaters, Lea Thompson still disputes the idea that the movie lost money. “It made a lot of money. It made its money,” she said on the November 3 episode of Taboo’s Comics & Kicks.
The summer after Back to the Future, Thompson traded Lorraine McFly for Beverly Switzler, the Cleveland rocker who takes in a stranded duck from another planet. George Lucas executive-produced the Marvel Comics adaptation, which opened on August 1, 1986.
Thompson said it took the rise of Marvel’s later blockbusters for people to start asking her about her place in that history. Howard had made it to Cleveland more than two decades before Robert Downey Jr. suited up in Iron Man.
Some fans have come up to Thompson at conventions in tears to tell her what the movie meant to them growing up. Her own review is a little more measured. “It was not perfect,” she told Taboo.
Universal Spent About $8 Million Just to Market Howard the Duck
Box Office Mojo lists $37.96 million in worldwide ticket sales, including $16.3 million in the United States and Canada. That’s close to the roughly $37 million the film cost to make. But theaters kept a share of each ticket, and the production budget left out the cost of selling the movie.
The Los Angeles Times reported during opening week that Universal spent about $8 million on advertising, publicity and promotion. One proposed poster put Howard alongside Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones. Lucas vetoed it, the poster designer said. The teaser that audiences saw showed a duck bill and a cigar poking through an egg. The film kept selling after it left theaters. The Numbers estimates that domestic DVD and Blu-ray buyers spent another $4.68 million.
Eric Stoltz Brought Thompson Her Next Script by Motorcycle
In 1986, Thompson was more worried about getting hired again. “It was very maligned, and I thought my career was over,” she recalled in a 2019 Entertainment Weekly oral history. She had already turned down the part of Amanda Jones in John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful because she thought the other girl in the story had the better role.
Hughes rewrote the script, and director Howard Deutch wanted her to read it again. Her friend Eric Stoltz rode his motorcycle up to her house with a copy. This time Thompson recognized something of herself in Amanda, a teenager frustrated that people saw only a pretty face. Four or five days later, she was filming. She and Deutch married in 1989.
One Fan of Beverly’s Band Later Wrote Thompson Into a Marvel Comic
Thompson’s costar Tim Robbins kept his own record of the shoot. During long waits on set in San Francisco in 1985, he started making a short film with his Panasonic video camera. The tapes spent years in cardboard boxes before he shared the 15-minute Rough Day in Duckland on his website.
Comic book writer Chip Zdarsky had a different reason to keep a recording. He told The Hollywood Reporter that he and a childhood friend rented the VHS tape over and over. They liked the closing number by Beverly’s band, Cherry Bomb, so much that they held a microphone up to the TV speakers to record it.
In 2016, Zdarsky and artist Joe Quinones gave Thompson a part in Marvel’s Howard the Duck comic. This time she appeared as herself, with a case for Howard in his new line of work as a private detective.