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You can almost hear the filmmakers celebrating tonight in their treetop homes, banging giant drums and singing the “Yub Nub” song like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. So many writers and directors have been jerked around by Kathleen Kennedy on Star Wars projects, hired with great fanfare, only to be squeezed and second-guessed and eventually fired without much explanation, that her exit as president of Lucasfilm today could be seen as almost cathartic. We all knew it was coming—hell, I told you it was coming last year and again at the beginning of the month—but if you’ve still got P.T.S.D. … breathe out…
Readers seem to want me to stomp on Kennedy, to revisit the 14 years of aborted film projects and boring fan service and missed opportunities with perhaps the most beloved I.P. in Hollywood history. Yes, she grossed more than $6 billion from five films, three Skywalker movies and the spinoffs Rogue One and Solo. And the Disney+ output was fine; a huge, platform-defining hit in The Mandalorian and two legitimately great seasons of Andor, and then… mostly expensive, middling performers and some outright clunkers (The Acolyte, The Book of Boba Fett). But the film franchise was essentially run into the ground as the three increasingly nonsensical Episode movies—the Force can inhabit anyone… until it can’t; Emperor Palpatine is dead… until he isn’t—left nowhere to go after Rise of Skywalker in 2019. Kennedy managed the most high-profile trilogy in decades, yet didn’t seem to know where the story was headed from one movie to the next.
Seven years between Skywalker and May’s The Mandalorian and Grogu is an inexcusable eternity in franchise filmmaking, and the projects Kennedy abandoned during that stretch could fill a Sarlacc pit. She announced new films with Rian Johnson, and Damon Lindelof and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and the Game of Thrones guys, and Josh Trank, and Taika Waititi, and Patty Jenkins (that one came with a hype video). She sidelined Gareth Edwards for Tony Gilroy in the middle of Rogue One, and fired Lord and Miller while they were shooting Solo despite signing off on their vision for a more comedic prequel. She booted Colin Trevorrow from Rise of Skywalker and paid a fortune for J.J. Abrams to undo Johnson’s creative choices in The Last Jedi because some nerds online were pissed. That’s just the stuff that became public. Over and over, sources pointed to a chaotic process at Lucasfilm. Now Donald Glover, Simon Kinberg, and James Mangold are awaiting the fate of their projects. Only Star Wars could keep convincing these Charlie Browns to line up to kick Kennedy’s football.
The I.P. Defense
Yesterday, Disney announced that the Galaxy’s Edge portion of Disneyland would “pivot” its theme, which is pegged to the Kennedy-era movies, and now incorporate Darth Vader, Princess Leia, and the first two trilogies. That’s what the fans want because they don’t connect to her movies and their characters, certainly not as much as Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger had hoped. And outside of Star Wars, Kennedy managed to spend $350 million on an Indiana Jones movie that essentially killed that film franchise, too.
So honestly, there’s not much more to say. If you can suppress your gag reflex long enough to read Kennedy’s exit interview with her leashed poodle at Deadline, you’ll notice she cites the constraints of the Star Wars I.P., and the sometimes toxic fan base, and the Disney of it all. “Anything’s a possibility if somebody’s willing to take a risk,” she said, all but blaming the company for not allowing more interesting filmmaking in the Star Wars universe, like Steven Soderbergh’s recently scrapped project with Adam Driver. It’s true that under Iger, many Disney units suffer from that unwillingness to take creative chances, especially with the big I.P. (I urge you to show the live-action Moana trailer to a kid and ask whether it’s different in any way from the animated movie.) Kennedy is one of the most accomplished movie producers of all time, with that incredible track record going all the way back to Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Amblin movies and all those Spielberg projects. She knows good material… she just couldn’t translate that into a pipeline of good Star Wars movies. She seems to have a hard time looking in the mirror, but clearly, a lot of factors contributed to that problem.
So in that sense, it’s a bit unfair that, among the fans, Kennedy has become a villain of sorts, especially when it comes to Disney’s place in the culture wars. A couple years ago, South Park painted her as a social justice warrior, screaming “Put a chick in it!” and “Make her lame and gay!” That characterization was a rare miss for Matt and Trey. Kathy’s not really woke, whatever that means, nor does she think much outside the box, especially compared to some Disney execs, past and present. Star Wars became more diverse because it needed to bring in new audiences. Most Lucasfilm people I talk to say diversity in filmmakers and casting is not something Kennedy talks about a lot.
Now the challenge for Dave Filoni, the chief creative officer and Star Wars producer who is taking over Lucasfilm with business-side exec Lynwen Brennan, will be to balance his goodwill among the fans with those realities of producing a slate of Disney blockbusters and attempting to expand the fickle fan base. Despite being handpicked by George Lucas, Kennedy was never considered “one of us” by the Star Wars obsessives. The speculation—and they were probably right—was that she’d prefer producing more important films, or the Spielberg projects, and that she took the Lucasfilm job only out of loyalty to George. Now, at 72, she’ll get to go back to doing that.
And Filoni will benefit from the dual-executive structure that Disney has employed at other creative units. Jared Bush runs creative for Disney Animation with Clark Spencer handling the business side. Pete Docter and Jim Morris divide duties similarly at Pixar. Kennedy, via her stature and her relationship with Iger, commanded a great deal of autonomy. Insiders do not foresee Filoni and Brennan enjoying that same deference.
Is Kennedy’s tenure atop Lucasfilm a failure? Certainly not. The machine chugs along, and one big hit movie—whether it’s Mandalorian and Grogu from Jon Favreau in May or Starfighter from Shawn Levy next year—and Star Wars will be “back.” But with this type of executive, you ask whether the franchise she inherited is in a better or worse place today than when she got the job. After five movies and 14 years, Star Wars must essentially start over as a film franchise. That’s not where you want to be.
