Hey, Darkwing Duck ... you still wanna get dangerous?

Sup, Popculturology fans. Welcome to the Friday newsletter. Have you already started celebrating Labor Day weekend?

Are you like me and definitely, absolutely, never in a million years planning on reading MrBeast and James Patterson’s upcoming book? The Most Dangerous Games is reportedly “on track to be a historic bomb,” with preorders “numbering in the four digits.” I dunno, maybe you shouldn’t have relied on the guy who’s never read a book to write a book.

Where is the Terror That Flaps in the Night?

It’s been over five years since we last saw Darkwing Duck. After appearing in the series finale of the fantastic DuckTales reboot, the animated superhero disappeared from our screens. Before DuckTales ended, there was a report that Disney+ was working on a new Darkwing Duck series, with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg on board as executive producers.

It’s 2026, and there still isn’t a new Darkwing Duck show.

“I did a pilot for it several years ago, to see the viability of it coming back, and everybody went nuts,” Jim Cummings, the actor who brought Darkwing to life in the original series, recently told Collider. “And they are bringing it back, and they’re hiring somebody else to do Terry McGovern’s role of Launchpad, and they’re hiring somebody else to be Darkwing Duck. I hope they get ... everything they deserve.”

Well, that certainly sounds like things aren’t going well.

I’m not surprised that a Darkwing Duck project on Disney+ has stalled out. After the promise of streaming glory during the pandemic, the studio has dramatically scaled back the dollars it’s putting into new Disney+ content. Despite Darkwing Duck meaning so much to folks like me who grew up with the show in the 1990s, it can’t be high on Disney’s list of surefire franchises.

And I’m not surprised that Cummings isn’t part of whatever Darkwing Duck project might be in the works. The DuckTales reboot not only passed the Darkwing torch to Chris Diamantopoulos, it also had Beck Bennett voicing Launchpad and Stephanie Beatriz voicing Gosalyn.

The dumbest part of all of this is that Disney should’ve just let Matt Youngberg and Francisco Angones, the geniuses behind the DuckTales reboot, continue building out that universe. Instead the studio canceled the show after three seasons.

For now, I guess we’ll have to catch up with Daniel Kibblesmith’s brilliant Darkwing Duck comics.

• Back to sleep: The hits keep coming for fans of the Disney Afternoon. The live-action version of Gargoyles set to be produced by James Wan’s Atomic Monster? Not happening anymore. “Well, I know the live-action side of it is, uh, the Atomic Monster had the license to develop a live-action Gargoyles for Disney+, and that’s dead,” Gargoyles creator Greg Weisman told a panel at Fan Expo Canada. “I have no idea about animation, but there are no current plans for live-action.” (What’s On Disney Plus)

‼️ THE BIG STORIES

I’m sure shooting Avengers: Doomsday without a finished script will be fine ...

Marvel Studios wants you to believe that it has a plan for how Avengers: Doomsday will tie together the strings of the MCU in the aftermath of Avengers: Endgame. That plan just didn’t involve a finished script.

The Russo brothers discussed the “revamped production” that turned Avengers: The Kang Dynasty into Doomsday led to them jumping back into the directors’ chairs without everything locked down.

“We always view the script as a living organism,” Joe Russo told The Associated Press. “We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors. We like to see what the actors bring to the characters, and sometimes you don’t get the actors until a few days or few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens.”

Man, I have a hard time reconciling the suggestion that shooting without a script can lead to “magic” when you have actors like Alan Cumming, who reprises his role as Nightcrawler from X2, revealing that he “did the entire film in isolation. Lots of green screen, face replacement. They even gave characters fake names. I don’t know who I was acting with half the time.” That doesn’t sound like a recipe for magic to me.