Lea Thompson speaking on a panel at Atlanta Comic Con in 2018

Howard the Duck at 40: The Number 3 Movie in America Before It Was a Punchline

August 1, 2026 Bobby And Jason

By Bobby Catalano & Jason Pascoe·We were on Dance Party USAWe were with the Dance Party USA family in the studio every week while it played. The Golden Years! The feel is memory. The facts are research, checked against the record.

Forty years ago today, and we are still arguing about a duck.

Howard the Duck opened in American theaters on August 1, 1986, which makes today its 40th anniversary. You already know the reputation. Marvel’s first movie. George Lucas’s disaster. The punchline that outlived everybody in it. Here is the part the reputation leaves out: on its opening weekend it was the number 3 movie in America. Over five million dollars, in 1,554 theaters. People went. Then they stopped going, and you can watch it happen one weekend at a time.

What was actually playing the weekend Howard the Duck opened

Box Office Mojo still has the receipts for the domestic weekend of August 1 to 3, 1986, and the chart is a perfect little snapshot of that summer.

Number one was Aliens, in its third weekend, $7,060,101. Number two was Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, opening cold at $6,750,837, because Jason Voorhees was a growth industry. Number three, opening in 1,554 theaters, was Howard the Duck: $5,070,136, an average of $3,262 a theater.

Behind it, number four, The Karate Kid Part II in weekend seven. Down at number seven, Top Gun, in its twelfth weekend, still pulling three and a half million dollars a weekend and past $107 million total, because in 1986 Top Gun simply would not leave.

That was the summer of 1986 at your local multiplex, and Howard was right in the middle of it. Not ignored. Not buried. Third biggest movie in the country, one row of the marquee down from a xenomorph and a hockey mask.

That was our summer too. Bobby had been on Dance Party USA since 1985 and Jason came on as a regular in 1986, which means we were exactly the age this movie was built to sell to, and it was on every marquee we went past. You could not miss it. That is what 1,554 theaters bought you in 1986.

So why did Howard the Duck fail?

Because the audience did not build. It evaporated.

Weekend two: down 46.4 percent, to number 8. Weekend three: down 62.2 percent, to number 17, with the theater count cut from 1,563 to 914. Weekend four: down 65.9 percent, 349 theaters left standing. It finished its domestic run at $16,295,774 against a budget Box Office Mojo lists at $37 million. Overseas it actually did better, $21,667,000, which is 57.1 percent of a worldwide total of about $37.9 million. America is the market that turned on it.

That drop is what bad word of mouth looked like before the internet existed. Nobody posted a review from the parking lot. It moved person to person, at work, at the pool, on the phone cord stretched into the hallway, over three weekends, and by Labor Day it was over. The marketing campaign took its share of the blame too.

The critics were merciless and they got there first. Gene Siskel gave it one star out of four in the Chicago Tribune, called it a “stupid film,” and wrote that the special effects “are less impressive than a sparkler on a birthday cake.” Rotten Tomatoes, gathering up 158 reviews in the years since, has it at 14 percent, the lowest-rated Lucasfilm production there is. Metacritic sits at 28 out of 100.

At the Razzies it drew seven nominations and won four: Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Visual Effects, and Worst New Star, which was handed to “the six guys and gals in the duck suit.” The Worst Picture trophy was a tie, and the movie it tied with was Under the Cherry Moon, which is to say that in 1986 the two worst pictures in America were a Marvel duck comedy and Prince’s directorial debut. Nobody was safe that year.

And then there is the number nobody quotes. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore graded it a B minus. That is not a good grade. It is also not the grade you give the worst movie ever made. The distance between a B minus and forty years of being the punchline is the whole story here.

Is Howard the Duck really the first Marvel movie?

Not the way everybody says it, no. That line needs a qualifier to survive contact with the record.

Marvel characters had been on screens for decades by 1986. There was a Captain America serial in 1944. There were TV movies and TV series through the 70s. What the record actually supports is narrower: Howard the Duck was the first theatrical Marvel release since that 1944 serial. In a piece updated in July 2026, /Film pushed back on the claim entirely, making the case for Red Sonja in 1985 and lining up Toei’s Marvel features and the old theatrical Spider-Man compilations behind it.

So “the first Marvel movie” is shorthand. It is the kind of shorthand that gets repeated until it becomes furniture, and the anniversary coverage is full of it.

The soundtrack is the part nobody argues about

Here is the thing we genuinely cannot get over. Thomas Dolby wrote the songs for this movie. Not a song. The songs. He also picked the members of Cherry Bomb, the band Beverly fronts, and he shows up in the film himself as a bartender.

Lea Thompson sang her own vocals. She learned the choreography alongside the band so the whole thing would line up on camera, and the closing number was shot in front of a live audience at The Warfield in San Francisco. The title track was written by Dolby with Allee Willis and George Clinton, a sentence we still have trouble getting through out loud. Allee Willis. George Clinton. On a duck movie. John Barry wrote the score, with a few cues swapped in from Sylvester Levay.

The Razzies nominated that title song for Worst Original Song. They were wrong. If you ever go digging through the strangest corners of the 80s movie soundtrack shelf, this record is sitting right there near the top of the pile, and it does not sound like a disaster at all. One more for the pile: Pat Smear, later of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, is in this movie as an extra.

What it cost the people who made it

Lea Thompson had just come off Back to the Future. She won Beverly out of an audition round that included Tori Amos, and she turned up dressed, in her own description, as “a cross between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.” Then the reviews hit, and she took Some Kind of Wonderful, a part she had already turned down once. Her reason, plainly: “I had to get on another movie, I wouldn’t have done the movie if Howard wasn’t such a bomb.”

Tim Robbins had never made a film before this one. He remembers it as “a huge deal at the time,” and he remembers the overtime, because the shoot ran long and he “ended up getting paid twice for that movie because of all the overtime.” Ed Gale, who spent the shoot inside the suit, got hired for Spaceballs on the strength of it, after Mel Brooks said, “Anybody who’s in Howard the Duck can be in my movie.” Gale says he still gets more fan mail for Howard than he does for playing Chucky.

Universal took it in the teeth too. The September 17, 1986 issue of Variety ran a piece headlined “Duck Cooks Price’s Goose” and pinned production head Frank Price’s departure on the movie. Price had not even approved it.

And Robin Williams was in line to voice Howard. He worked a week and walked. “I can’t do this. It is insane. I can’t get the rhythm of this. I am being confined. I am being handcuffed to match the flapping duck’s bill.” Chip Zien got the job instead, and Zien’s voice is the one you have been doing at parties for forty years.

The Pixar story you have heard is not true

It comes back around every anniversary: Howard the Duck bombed so badly that George Lucas had to sell off his computer division, and that division became Pixar.

Check the calendar. Pixar was spun out of Lucasfilm and incorporated on February 3, 1986, in Richmond, California, with Steve Jobs putting up the money. Howard the Duck opened on August 1, 1986. The company had already existed for almost six months when the first ticket was sold.

Where Howard came from, and where he went

Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik created Howard for Marvel in 1973, in a comic called Adventure into Fear, issue 19, where he turned up as a side character in the Man-Thing feature. He got his own title in 1976, and that same year Gerber ran him for president under the banner of the All-Night Party, campaign slogan “Get Down, America!” The joke of the comic, according to Gerber, was that there was no joke: life’s most serious moments and its most incredibly dumb moments are often separated by nothing but a point of view.

That is not a movie Universal was ever going to release in the summer of 1986. Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who wrote it and who had written American Graffiti with Lucas, wanted it animated. A contract obligated Lucas to deliver a live-action picture, Universal wanted something for the summer slot, animation was judged too slow and too expensive, and so Lucasfilm started building duck suits and ILM took the effects. They also ran the design past Disney’s lawyers to make sure Howard did not look too much like Donald.

Gerber’s own verdict, offered in 1997: “What can I say? It sucks. In retrospect, though, after eleven years that have brought us so many worse films, it’s not quite as sucky as the reviews might have led you to believe.” He liked Jeffrey Jones, he liked Robbins, he liked Thompson.

Howard came back anyway. Somewhere in those forty years the film picked up a cult following, which is a very 80s way to end up. He has been turning up in Marvel movies since 2014 with Seth Green’s voice on him. Lea Thompson pitched Marvel Studios a new Howard picture she would direct herself, and they passed. And this year the film got a 40th anniversary 4K release, which is a genuinely funny place to land for the most-punished movie Lucasfilm ever put its name on.

Forty years later

Here is where we land, forty years on. Howard the Duck is not the worst movie ever made and it never was. It is a strange, expensive, badly aimed comedy with a great soundtrack, a real actress giving a real performance to a puppet, and a stretch in the middle where it almost works. What it actually was, on the first weekend of August 1986, was the third biggest movie in America, playing down the hall from Aliens and Jason Voorhees while Top Gun refused to go home. It was part of that summer. It just did not survive it.

So watch it. All the way through, sound up for the Cherry Bomb numbers. You have been told what to think about this movie for forty years, mostly by people who were not standing in that theater in 1986. Give it an hour and you will understand exactly why America turned up. Stay to the end and you will understand why they left.

Both of those things are true, and only one of them made it into the legend.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

When did Howard the Duck come out?
Howard the Duck was released in United States theaters on August 1, 1986, which makes August 1, 2026 its 40th anniversary. It reached some other countries later, including Germany on December 18, 1986, and it played the United Kingdom under the title Howard… A New Breed of Hero.

Why did Howard the Duck fail?
Its opening audience did not come back. It opened at number 3 in America with $5,070,136, then fell 46.4 percent in its second weekend, 62.2 percent in its third and 65.9 percent in its fourth. Reviews were savage, the marketing campaign took part of the blame, and it closed its domestic run at $16,295,774 against a budget Box Office Mojo lists at $37 million.

Is Howard the Duck the first Marvel movie?
Only with a qualifier. Marvel characters had appeared in a 1944 Captain America serial and in TV movies and series before 1986. Howard the Duck was the first theatrical Marvel release since that 1944 serial, and even that is disputed: /Film argues the honest answer is Red Sonja in 1985.

How much money did Howard the Duck make?
It grossed $16,295,774 in the United States and $21,667,000 internationally, for about $37.9 million worldwide. International was the larger share at 57.1 percent, so the film actually did better outside America than inside it.

Did Lea Thompson really sing in Howard the Duck?
Yes. Thompson performed her own vocals as Beverly Switzler and learned the band choreography so it would match on camera. Thomas Dolby wrote the songs and chose the members of Cherry Bomb, and the closing performance was filmed in front of a live audience at The Warfield in San Francisco.

Did Howard the Duck’s failure create Pixar?
No. Pixar was spun out of Lucasfilm and incorporated on February 3, 1986, with funding from Steve Jobs. Howard the Duck did not open until August 1, 1986, almost six months later.

Sources

Photos: Lea Thompson at Atlanta Comic Con, 2018 by Thomson200, CC0. Lea Thompson, 2008 by Gregg Bond, CC BY 2.0. Thomas Dolby, 2006 by Arthur Mouratidis, CC BY 2.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.