Kathleen Kennedy Leaving Lucasfilm! Is This Good?
A couple days back there was an interesting report about Lucasfilm, it’s CEO Kathleen Kennedy might be retiring from Lucasfilm at the end of 2025. What do I think about this? Am I excited about this?
The Article: https://variety.com/2025/film/news/star-wars-kathleen-kennedy-exit-lucasfilm-1236319794/
My Thoughts
- If you’ve been a Star Wars fan over the last 10 years you probably have thoughts and feelings about Kathleen Kennedy. Even though I might not know you I can assume they probably weren’t very positive. She has done a terrible job running Lucasfilm. Almost every single Lucasfilm project released under her control has been disappointing. There’s been some big wins and hits, The Force Awakens made $2 billion and was celebrated. The Mandalorian was a hit show. Andor got fantastic reviews. Almost everything else has been either disappointing or bad. Even some of those hits I mentioned I don’t praise Kennedy about. The Force Awakens making $2 billion was always a guarantee whether Kennedy oversaw it or not. That was an event film that everybody went to see on the big screen. Andor felt like it slipped through the cracks and I praise the showrunner, not Kennedy.
- The bigger problem that she’s had with running Lucasfilm is she will recruit big name talent and do nothing with it. The article lists all of the directors and writers they brought on board for a movie that never happened or haven’t had any updates since they were announced. James Mangold, Sharmeen Obaid-Chiony, Taika Waititi, Donald Glover, Patty Jenkins, Kevin Feige, Rian Johnson, and David Benioff & D.B. Weiss. All of those filmmakers or creatives have been announced to be working on a Star Wars project between 2019 and 2023 and none of them have happened yet. That’s bad. The people listed are very talented people that have done other things that I’ve loved. Several of them I would have been very excited to see their take on Star Wars. It’s a shame that we’ve never gotten any of these movies. It’s been six years since the last Star Wars movie and the next Star Wars movie doesn’t come out until May 2026. It's sad that this generation is growing up with Star Wars as television and most of it isn’t great. I blame so much of this on Kathleen Kennedy not being able to recruit and keep talent. She needed to brainstorm ideas for what she wanted to do with Star Wars. The way she went about hiring people was figuring out who were the hot new directors that had something interesting to say. You take Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman, a big box office hit. Kathleen Kennedy wants her to do a Star Wars movie, fair enough. They made a video back in 2020 describing what it is and it’s basically Top Gun in the world of Star Wars. It’s a passion project for her because her dad was an Air Force pilot. You hear that concept and you go “that sounds interesting. I want to see that”. Because Kennedy didn’t have a plan for Star Wars it didn’t work out because of creative differences. If Kennedy had mapped out 10 movies and tv shows that she wants to do in Star Wars. She starts finding talent that can best serve her vision for Star Wars. Instead it happened the other way around, that’s not good.
- Tied to that you look at the sequel trilogy and that was a mess. I love The Force Awakens. That's the top 3 Star Wars for me. I like The Last Jedi. I don’t think it’s fantastic. It’s flawed but a good movie. I have never liked The Rise of Skywalker. That’s a Frankenstein monster of a movie that was a reaction film to the polarization of The Last Jedi. That was the movie that closed out The Skywalker Saga, a mess of a movie that closed out that iconic saga of movies. Despite enjoying ⅔ of that trilogy, I can acknowledge that it was not a good trilogy. She should have worked with J.J. Abrams about mapping out that trilogy you figure out the characters arcs, the stories everything that a good producer would do. Instead they didn’t and made it up as they went along. The Force Awakens sets up a lot of interesting stuff and ideas. Rian Johnson follows it with The Last Jedi and pulls the rug out from underneath and does something totally different. He basically undermines and subverts expectations on everything J.J. Abrams set up. That led to the internet being polarized by that movie. So they brought back Abrams for The Rise of Skywalker returned to the tone of The Force Awakens and was a reaction film to The Last Jedi. They tried to make The Force Awakens fans happy by returning to that style and win back the fans of The Last Jedi. But instead they made nobody happy and everybody felt disappointed with that trilogy. The Force Awakens was a true cinematic event. It was this big epic thing to go see The Force Awakens opening night, multiple times opening weekend and experience Star Wars on the big screen again. By the time The Rise of Skywalker came out, everybody was done. Everybody left The Rise of Skywalker feeling disappointed and sad. I blame a large portion of that on Kennedy being TERRIBLE at her job.
- This then raises the question with Kennedy gone. Does it raise my excitement for the Star Wars future? Not really. Hopefully with Kennedy gone they can get back on track. I don’t know who you replace Kennedy with. People were throwing out Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni as replacements. I can see why people’s first thoughts. They’ve been in the Star Wars system. Favreau has always been hit or a mess. He’s done great movies, Elf, Iron Man, and The Jungle Book. Iron Man 2 and The Lion King, not great movies. The first couple of seasons of The Mandalorian were fantastic. Season three of The Mandalorian is not great. The Book of Boba Fett is not great. Filoni has done well on television for Star Wars. I liked Ahsoka. It was a good show, but it was flawed. It felt like a tv show and not as big and epic as Star Wars should be. I don’t trust him as a creative person to run a studio. He hasn’t shown that he can do more besides creating tv shows. People argue “well he did The Clone Wars”. Fair enough. That show was created in 2008. There was a long period of gap between The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian where he didn’t do much. The other name people are throwing out there, Kevin Feige. I doubt this will ever happen, I don’t see Feige leaving Marvel or co-running Marvel and Star Wars. I don’t know who Kennedy’s replacement should be. Maybe they should do what DC is doing with James Gunn and Peter Safran. Gunn is a great storyteller and creative. Safran is a great businessman. They’re co-running a company but are doing very different things. Maybe that’s what Star Wars needs, find a great storyteller and a great businessman and have them co-run the studio. OR, they need to stop production on everything Star Wars for a couple of years. And figure out what to do next.
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