Kathleen Kennedy And The Future Of Star Wars

Well, it finally happened. It’s been rumored so often that the rumor itself had become a gag. And yet here we are, official word that Kathleen Kennedy has decided to leave Lucasfilm…mostly. She’ll still be a producer but she’s not running the show. Instead Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan (whoever that is) will be taking over. Of course this news dropped when my posting schedule wouldn’t allow for it, me finding out about it just after Friday’s post went live. By now everybody on the internet has put in their two cents, so here’s mine. By this point we’ve heard this so much I’m not convinced she’s truly going, and if she did, the real question is if it’s too late to save the franchises she destroyed in the process, namely Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Willow.

I admittedly don’t follow the other two. The Indiana Jones movies always seem to have those gross-out moments I don’t care for, and Willow came from a genre I only tangentially know about because it’s not one I follow. That’s why my focus will be on Star Wars, but it’s not like those properties did well during Kennedy’s reign as well. Still, there is a question of what can and can’t be blamed on her in light of the idiots around her…except the idiots she could have stopped she didn’t.

Let’s be clear where this commentary is going. This is another example of one person leaving not fixing things. We’ve seen this in comics and now we’re seeing it here. Just as Dan DiDio’s leaving DC Comics didn’t fix the company, neither will Star Wars or any of the other Lucasfilm properties be saved by her departure and for the same reason: everyone else is still there.

I mentioned a number of Kennedy’s failings when the rumors first sounded serious. That article was from February or last year! The big one was the whole “The Force Is Female” vibe she was going with. That included Forces Of Destiny, a series of shorts that even I praised when they came out. I didn’t and still don’t have a problem with highlighting the EXISTING female heroes and villains of the Star Wars galaxy. Apparently the video no longer exists, so that’s confusing. The problem was that beyond this the idea wasn’t to lift up the girls but to tear down the boys and make the girls more important instead of on equal footing. This meant tossing away beloved characters in favor of the new hotness when the franchise was built off of old characters, including Leia and Padme. Of course fans, including women, balked at characters they already enjoyed going away, whether it was for social reasons or just the creators wanting to make their characters the new heroes of a popular brand in order to remake it in their image.

“Can I take over as the face of the franchise now, daddy?”

There were fans to tried to take heart in the fact that Dave Filoni was going to “save the franchise”. Last time someone wanted to “save the franchise” it was from George Lucas, who created it. Look how that turned out. Not surprising he doesn’t want to return. And yet Filoni, even under Lucas, has begun his own undermining. Ashoka Tano was created to be Anakin’s padawan, a way to watch him grow as a Jedi. At some point Filoni fell in love with his surrogate daughter and wanted to protect her from the Jedi massacre of Order 66, also making sure to protect fan favorite clone Rex by having his chip damaged so he protected her instead. The only disagreement between Filoni and Kennedy was whose favorite character would be replacing Luke, Rei or Ashoka. With Kennedy leaving, odds are Ashoka is going to leave. Even in her farewell interview with Deadline, Kennedy didn’t mention the movie.

Which leads into DisneyFilm’s history of announcing projects only to cancel them if the director had a big failure. Indiana Jones cartoons and spinoffs were recently canceled, probably for the same reason. There were movies and of course Disney+ shows announced and starting get less and less buzz from fans as things went along. That’s because those projects weren’t very good. The disaster of The Acolyte is all over the internet. The only praise from Disney+ was the early seasons of The Mandalorian when Jon Favreau was still heavily taking part. Bob Iger, source of so many of modern Disney’s miserable failures and legacy destroying, was probably behind a lot of that as he wanted to push the new streaming service so bad he bought as many movie studios and libraries as he could.

Then they tried their own timeline, the so-called “High Republic” period allegedly taking place before the days of what’s become known as the Old Republic. Nobody was interested after seeing that the writers were less interested in what made good Star Wars and what fans liked about Star Wars and tried to go for the One Story To Rule Them All, the mythical tale that everyone who sees it will suddenly praise the creator, come together, end world hunger, cure all diseases, and every other miracle they expect to happen, which of course they want to be the one to make so everyone will love them forever and ever. I’m not sure what got made fun of more, the infamous whiteboard image of dumb ideas or that one of their characters…was a rock. The only thing that remotely worked was the Disney Junior series Young Jedi Adventures, which gets about as much discussion as that Resistance cartoon you probably forgot existed.

There’s a reason that video has a lot of swearing. We’re not going to blame Kennedy for Ubisoft’s failure to make Star Wars Outlaws anything even playable, nevermind a terrible story. The game itself was a glitchy mess, the story of “what if Han Solo was a girl” was not well received by fans not only for the story itself but because of how ugly the character model was. Presumably Kennedy signed off on it, but there hasn’t been a highly praised Star Wars game since Jedi: Fallen Order. If you have more time than I do, MauLer did a SEVENTEEN HOUR VIDEO?????? on the failures of Outlaws. Geez, and Jay Exci got flack for how long his examination of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who run was too long. They don’t call him the “longman” for nothing, I guess. (Hope they had his breakdown when Jabba comes in an X-Wing to save the game’s protagonist.) The point is that’s all on them. They might have patched the glitches but to be like this at launch for $70 US? You aren’t fixing the reputation.

Then you have the only two people probably not making a return but were responsible for the first failures: J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson. Abrams may have followed Iger’s edict to throw out all of the suggestions George Lucas made for the next trilogy but he didn’t replace it with much. His first movie was a rehash of the story beats from the original movie (AKA “A New Hope”, a name added later to continue the serial inspiration instead of just calling it Star Wars), and yet Mark Hamill just dropped the fact that Abrams purposefully didn’t want a scene with the three main characters of the original trilogy back together, the one thing fans wanted most. With Carrie Fisher dead in real life and both Han and Luke dead in universe that can now never happen. There’s dropping the ball and there’s dropkicking it into the Grand Canyon.

He tried handing off to Johnson, but Johnson in turn and potential karma tossed out Abrams suggestions, tried to wrap up storylines because he didn’t know what a trilogy is, did so rather poorly so that Finn didn’t have closure to his character arc while Rei’s revelations were controversial (I actually didn’t mind the idea that she wasn’t born from greatness but I can see how unsatisfactory it is), made Poe look like a jerk, Luke look like an overractionary moron, and then told every fan that he was great for subverting not just expectations but desires. As early as last month was saying that he loved splitting the fans while just over the weekend he pushed back against Kennedy’s claims in the interview that he was scared off of his canceled trilogy. So Abrams had to come back and fix his mistakes, only to make a movie that pissed off everybody, classic fans and The Last Jedi defenders alike. That’s not the unity you should be going for, J.

I don’t think we have to go over the failings of The Acolyte. From the space witches Filoni allegedly signed off on, the twins who were potentially named after a soap company and while I could be wrong I am NOT making that up, a celebration of the Dark Side, showrunner Leslie Headland told by Kennedy to take her supposedly proper Star Wars story and make “her” (Leslie’s) Star Wars instead so she filled it with daddy issues and her wife, and all of that for starters, the thing was a complete disaster and is still mocked for that “power of mannnnnnyyyyyyy” scene.

A media push so good I didn’t know it wasn’t official. Toys, games, a SOUNDTRACK, and a good sequel comic.

Finally there’s the Expanded Universe debacle. You know, the books, comics, audio dramas, and video games Kennedy said didn’t exist to figure out how to tell Star Wars beyond the original trilogy without the big trio or passing on the torch to, say, Han & Leia’s twins, one of whom succumbed to the Dark Side. (And it was the brother. The sister stayed on the Light Side.) At the time I understood them not wanting to dig through all of that backstory even if I question how necessary it was to do so. However, given what replaced it, maybe they should have done animated adaptations of the most important stuff that the actors were too old to do. Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels are both good at voice acting and played Luke and C-3PO respectively recently enough that we know they can pull it off. Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher…well, based on the only good scene in The Star Wars Holiday Special some serious coaching would be needed and I don’t know what Billy Dee Williams can do versus his regular acting but I’d still like to see it. Otherwise, soundalikes have been used before to zero complaints unlike physical replacements in Solo: A Star Wars Story and Young Indiana Jones. You’re never getting that back, but have the cheap knockoff version of Grand Admiral Thrawn who isn’t nearly as good as the book version they tossed out.

That’s the problem. Filoni and whatshername aren’t going to change anything except maybe direction or tone. Ashoka or maybe Sabine Wren may be the new Skywalker replacement but the Expanded Universe will never be canon again, the High Republic and sequels will still be canon, and everyone else who was responsible for the mess Star Wars has become isn’t leaving with her whether she brought them in or not. These people don’t know what do to with Star Wars because they don’t have the passion for the franchise that better creators in novels, comics, video games, and movies have brought to the table, while looking down on the fans who made the brand popular in the first place for not sharing their clearly superior takes in the search of the One Story. The non-story merchandise isn’t moving any better than the story media, people are done with Star Wars, and all they can do is mourn the passing and laugh at the bad stewards’ continued karmic failures. That’s all this franchise has become. One of the biggest brands in science fiction, if not all of fiction, is a sad joke and fans laugh to hide the tears of crying. Kathleen Kennedy succeeded in remaking Star Wars to her preferences and the people who come after her will remake it into theirs.

So what they won’t be making is Star Wars. Fans wanted Star Wars “saved” from George Lucas after the prequels and got their wish. Now nobody can save Star Wars from Iger, Filloni, Brennan, and all of the other people who aren’t going anywhere but still deserve the blame for ruining a cash printer that’s long run out of ink.