Kathleen Kennedy Steps Down From LucasFilm… And?

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News came early yesterday that Kathleen Kennedy would be stepping down as president of Disney-owned LucasFilm. This is after years of rumors that she would be fired or her power diminished because some how Bob Iger, who has his own history of legacy destroying, were proven false in the past. Of course, the people you’d expect to celebrate threw a celebration…but I found this time a few more people tempering their celebratory natures by realizing something I’ve been noting for a few years now: it’s not the victory you think it is…if this indeed comes to pass this time.

To say that Kennedy’s reign over Star Wars and other properties created or signed off by George Lucas, LucasFilm, the video game arm LucasArts, and the various tie-in novels, comics, audio dramas has been controversial is a huge understatement. Her “Sequel Trilogy” is still used as examples of bad filmmaking. The Acolyte is one of the biggest jokes in Star Wars discussion. The “High Republic” only had one interesting story and it was the preschool show that actually taught kids how to be a good person in a show about kids who can fly through space in their own starships and fighters despite not even hitting puberty yet. It certainly wasn’t the book about a creature that looked like a rock and followed Weeping Angels rules when it came to moving, “The Force is female”, or any of the other errors during Kennedy’s time.

So now that she’s gone all fans’ problems are over, right? The lady parodied by South Park with “put a chick in it, make her lame and gay” is finally going away. This will make up for everything done to Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Willow. Oh wait, this doesn’t solve anything. It might not even stop things from getting worse. Have we learned nothing?

Sometimes you need a defense against disappointment.

That’s the first time I noticed this trend among the negative critics, and as it turned out, Leon was right. Axel Alonso didn’t fix the mistakes Joe Quesada made at pre-Disney Marvel. C.B. Cebulski still hasn’t fixed mistakes of the past, and both only made more at Disney Marvel. It was the same thing at DC Comics when Dan DiDio left and Jim Lee took over, as DiDio’s Darker DC is still how the universe operates, only now with gay Jon Kent and Tim Drake because fanshipping. I’m surprised they weren’t set up with each other, but apparently Tim wanting his friend Connor back–and one writer wanted to make Connor into “Connie”–got the fanshipping community insisting they should hook up because they don’t understand what “friendship” is. They just care about gay sex. (You don’t hear about the straight fanships these days.) If anything, things got worse at both publishers with the already troublesome grimdark-pushing egotists more interested in their story than continuing the story of the characters adding activism to their ranks after the 2016 elections pushed extremists to take over pop culture with their message and poor storytelling, tossing out classic heroes in favor of ones they thought would easily replace heroes who have been around since the 1960s (or earlier in Captain America and DC Comics’ cases).

Finn never got to have a character arc. No, he didn’t need to be a Jedi to have one.

As Az noted in the short video above, she’s not leaving until “sometime this year”, possibly at the end. That means that while they search for a successor, she’s still in charge. If she’s the vengeance minded type, what she’s done on accident will be nothing to the scorched earth policy she could break out on purpose as she walks out the door. Some people joked that Lucas was so not interested in his franchise (and given the tolls taken on his personal life and the extreme response to his Prequel Trilogy he might not be blamed) that he purposely put Kennedy in charge to derail it. Now, that’s probably not the case and it’s intended as a joke, but she couldn’t do a worse job if she was actively trying to kill Star Wars. Like I said earlier, the Sequel Trilogy is still treated as a masterclass in how not to continue a franchise, with it arguable which of the last two is the worst. The Disney Plus series both animated and live-action have met with a shrug or a laugh, with only Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian (and even then just the first two seasons) and the low-rated Andor and Skeleton Crew getting any kind of favorable report. Even in video game realms you had a success like Jedi: Fallen Order followed by the failure that was Star Wars: Outlaws.

The biggest failure of the Sequel Trilogy is that it didn’t properly pass the torch to the next generation. Fans wanting to see the old gang get back together and pass their legacy to the next generation missed out. Leia met with Han and Luke separately for about a minute each, Chewbacca got to hang with Han and Leia individually, Lando barely does anything, R2 and C-3PO never interact with any of their old friends, and trying to undo Rian Johnson’s screwing up character arcs for existing characters while doing The Empire Strikes Back in narrative backwards led to even more things people didn’t like, the forced returned of Palpatine (no pun intended) being the biggest sin unless you hated Rey taking on a name she didn’t earn. Then again, she didn’t earn most of her rewards but she got them anyway. I still say making Rowan Freemaker canon would have helped, but LEGO and Atomic Cartoons did a better job with her than LucasFilm did by making her earn her victory and learn a lesson she could take back with her to be a better person.

“Daddy Dave thinks I’m ready to take over.”

So the question is, who is going to replace Kennedy? Right now the only one that even seems likely is Dave Filoni, which comes with his own baggage. While praised thanks to Clone Wars and his work on The Mandalorian, Filoni’s own work with Ahsoka proved that he has a parental version of Pet Character Syndrome, treating Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren like his daughters, having Ezra be more excited by seeing the former despite being such close friends with the latter that she risked the future of the universe just to see him again. While recently getting praise from Kennedy, she used to hate him when The Mandalorian was outdoing her sequels and stand-alones like Solo. Among the “she’s fired” rumors were rumors of the two being on opposite ends of a struggle for the future of Star Wars, only for that struggle being between Kennedy’s favored Rey against Filoni’s favored Ashoka for who would succeed Luke Skywalker as the most important Jedi in the franchise.

Let’s not forget that LucasFilm isn’t just Star Wars. Kennedy’s “mastery” also filtered to Indiana Jones, where she supposedly pushed Indy to the side in favor of a new woman character that was clearly intended to be the new adventurer, while the series version of Willow just disappointed fans left and right. I didn’t any of them so I can only speak to the complaints, and they were not happy ones. The only franchises she didn’t touch were THX-1138, the student film that started George’s career and was used as the name for their advanced audio system in the 1990s, and American Graffiti, the movie about teens and cars. We won’t even get into all the announced one-shots, spinoffs, and trilogies that went nowhere and weren’t exactly exciting anyone anyway.

They aren’t going to undo any of those changes. Willow and Indy’s tales are still dead and altered, unable to be fixed. With Carrie Fisher, Kenny Baker, and Peter Mayhew gone, even considering the last two were in costume, there can be no reunion. Luke and Han are dead and all the surviving actors are too old to physically act as their characters in live-action to go back to the “Legends” timeline and adapt those. I like animation but I don’t know if Shadows Of The Empire or a proper Thrawn Trilogy adaptation would even go over well, and going from book to movie would mean trimming down the story. Either way, there is no saving these properties except to ignore those events, and that’s not an easy thing to do since that torch passing was botched so badly.

Is the damage irreversible? In a technical sense no, but Disney is only replacing the president of their acquired LucasFilm division. The rest of the people responsible who weren’t there for a single project like Leslie Headland are still going to be there. Sidebar: Headland once said that she handed her original pitch to Kennedy, who allegedly told her “that’s good Star Wars, but I want to see a good Headland production” and she reworked everything. I would love to see the original concept for The Acolyte if that’s true, but the point is the only way Disney is going to “save Star Wars” is a serious housecleaning, bringing in talented writers and producers who actually want to make good Star Wars and build on the lore of the galaxy far far away the same way the de-canonized “Legends” continuity did and LEGO Star Wars still does. At best, Kennedy is just thrown to the wolves because so much blame was placed on her, but fans did that to Lucas for the “Prequel Trilogy”, insisting they had to “save Star Wars” from its creator. Look how that turned out, and consider if one sacrifice will be enough. Spoilers: it probably won’t.