If the Kathleen Kennedy Era at Lucasfilm Is Ending, Its Legacy Is Unfulfilled Promises and Unfair Expectations
With hindsight, she faced almost impossible odds. The kind that even might have daunted Han Solo.
How could there ever have been another “Star Wars,” following George Lucas’s hate-magnet prequels, that wouldn’t incur insensate fan wrath? Being angry about “Star Wars” had almost become the default emotion for fans of “Star Wars” when Lucas hand-picked Kathleen Kennedy — now reported by Puck to be retiring at the end of this year, which Lucasfilm denied to Variety — to run the company upon his own retirement in May 2012. The immediate expectation was that, with her three decades of experience producing some of the most beloved blockbusters of all time (“E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” Indiana Jones!) as Steven Spielberg’s producing partner, she would develop new theatrical films for the “Star Wars” franchise.
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That came to fruition just five months later on October 30, 2012, when an announcement was made that rocked the galaxy: Lucas had negotiated the sale of his company to Disney for $4.3 billion and a sequel to “Return of the Jedi,” simply titled “Star Wars: Episode VII” at that point, was in the works to kick off a whole new trilogy, with Kennedy at the helm.
How promising those days seemed. For this life-long “Star Wars” fan huddling in a New York City apartment that still didn’t have power in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the news about these new “Star Wars” movies was nothing but electrifying, a shot in the arm. Kennedy herself was just entering an awards season victory lap with “Lincoln” as an eventual Best Picture nominee — in her career pre-Lucasfilm, she received eight Best Picture nominations, including for films directed by filmmakers other than Spielberg, such as “The Sixth Sense,” “Seabiscuit,” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
She was giving all that up, and the leadership of shingle The Kennedy/Marshall Company alongside husband Frank Marshall, to steer the “Star Wars” franchise.
Twelve and a half years later, that promise has all but evaporated. Make no mistake: She has been at the helm as “Star Wars” has given us some all-time highs (“The Last Jedi,” “Andor,” the Season 2 finale of “The Mandalorian”), but also far more enervating lows that have left even the most bullish fan wondering where “Star Wars” goes from here.
Since the release of “The Last Jedi,” and the mindless backlash it incurred, Kennedy has been almost an effigy to be pilloried by the most unforgiving and hate-filled fans. (It seems odd to even be calling them fans in this context.) She has presided over an era that saw authentic hate for the prequels, unfair as much of that hate might have been, curdle into the monetized hate of an entire YouTube grifter class that makes money off the most views they can incur from their rage-filled takes. Even the one possibly universally adored property created on her watch during her tenure, “Andor,” has resulted in videos titled “How ‘Andor’ Ruined ‘Star Wars'” on YouTube.
Is Kennedy actually leaving now? Her Board of Governors Award from the ASC on February 22 sure had a valedictory feel to it. If she’s not leaving, where does “Star Wars” go from here? (IndieWire’s request for comment to Lucasfilm went unanswered as of publication time.)
There is simply no pleasing a certain sect of YouTubers and social media “influencers” who otherwise would not make money unless they peddled hate. It is their business model. With that in mind, Kennedy’s tenure faced impossible odds. You’d have to invoke the infamous no-win scenario of another space franchise, the Kobayashi Maru of “Star Trek,” to emphasize this point. She deserves hazard pay for jumping into the fray and leading it amidst this.
With hindsight, you can see “Star Wars” and the reactions it incurred over the past decade as the ultimate Hollywood battleground for the culture wars, and an odd avatar for America’s irreconcilable chasm between left and right. Simultaneously, the fraught production history of multiple titles at Lucasfilm on her watch made the studio a kind of stand-in for Hollywood’s ongoing battle between filmmaker freedom and the storytelling by committee that drives much of the industry’s IP franchise adaptations.
The bottom line is: The way “Star Wars” has been discussed for almost a decade has not been about art or storytelling, but about these movies and its TV spinoffs as representative of other things. They’re not films or TV shows, they’re symbols. And Kennedy is a film producer. She faced a no-win scenario.
Kennedy’s own track record is not blameless. For as much as she tried to position herself as pro-filmmaker, “The Last Jedi” essentially remains the last “Star Wars” film on her watch that was scripted, shot, and edited per its director Rian Johnson’s wishes. Creative sparring with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller on “Solo: A Star Wars Story” resulted in their departure — and they immediately won an Oscar for producing “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” afterward. “Rogue One” was all but taken out of its credited director Gareth Edwards’ hands and handed to Tony Gilroy (who ended up showrunning both seasons of tie-in “Andor”). It’s possible Edwards and Lord/Miller just weren’t ready for such big projects the way Gilroy obviously was, which is a hiring problem that is also on Kennedy.
There have been too many aborted film projects since to round up here. The result of all this was that a very pro-filmmaker producer was no longer seen in the industry as having filmmakers’ backs. The brand was all that mattered. She never said as much, but much like Sam Mendes alleged of Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, it seemed she wanted “controllable directors.”
But how could it have been otherwise? Even though Lucas hired her to run his company, the first film produced under her remit, “The Force Awakens,” was crafted, in part, as a kind of rebuke of Lucas and his prequels: The very first line said in that movie is “This will begin to make things right.” It was a message to the fans who still hated the prequels. All the messaging around “The Force Awakens” was aligned with that: It would be built more around practical effects, unlike the prequels; it would tap into the emotions and family dynamic of the original trilogy (“Chewie, we’re home”); it wouldn’t be about the taxation of trade routes.
Like or dislike the prequels as you wish, but those were movies made by a filmmaker. The messaging around “The Force Awakens” was unambiguously that Lucasfilm was now listening to the fans above all. And fan-influenced art at the studio level is nothing more than crowdsourced art. It’s the same as Jeff Bezos taking to X last week asking who should be the next James Bond after acquiring creative control of that property.
Lucasfilm made a gamble with that messaging that they would never be able to win: You let the fans dictate your creative direction from the start like they did with “Force Awakens,” and you will be held hostage by them ever since.
And so it has gone, with a succession of movies and TV shows over the past decade that have largely made no one happy, and have not even lodged in people’s brains on the level that the prequels have. Just compare the number of prequel trilogy memes on social media to sequel trilogy memes. The true “no going back” moment was after a vocal segment of fans — to the apparent shock of Lucasfilm, which never seemed to expect any backlash — hated “The Last Jedi.”
The studio interfered with the next movie, “The Rise of Skywalker,” to ostensibly undo and retcon much of “The Last Jedi,” ending up with a Frankenstein-ed mess that was calculated to try to satisfy everyone (or at least not piss them off) and thrill no one. In the end, no one was satisfied and everyone was pissed off. At least lean into the fans who liked “The Last Jedi”! But those fans were lost too. “The Rise of Skywalker” is one of the great creative surrenders in moviemaking history. Filmmakers should be making films. Not corporate suits or committees trying simply to channel what they think may or may not land with fans.
Was this uniquely Kennedy’s fault? No. Even the beloved Marvel Studios that was riding high at the time of “The Rise of Skywalker” has since withered into creative oblivion. “Captain America: Brave New World” seems to follow a “Rise of Skywalker” template, actually. “Rise of Skywalker” infamously featured a blink-or-miss-it same-sex kiss at the end that the right hated and the left thought was tokenism and pandering. “Brave New World” still pisses off the right for touching lightly upon issues a Black Captain America might face and pisses off its Black audience by not substantively grappling with Cap being Black at all. These are movies that are ultimately made for no one.
Would I or anyone else have made choices different from Kennedy? I can’t say. This was an impossible situation to be in. The culture, and its neverending “discourse” that renders a “Star Wars” property as an avatar for something else, seems to have brought us to a point where it’s impossible for any “Star Wars” film to be made at all. There could be nowhere to go other than just doing what “The Force Awakens” achieved and recycling the original trilogy over and over again.
Kennedy’s attention to detail is admirable. Full disclosure: This writer wrote several “Star Wars” books in the early days following Disney’s acquisition, including one called “Star Wars Made Easy” that ostensibly was meant to be a primer to bring new fans onboard. Even then there was almost 40 years of lore to catch up on. If somebody wanted to become a fan, where would they even start? My remit was to help with that introduction, and it was my understanding that Kennedy herself kept close tabs on this project, seeing it as a critical tool to expand the fanbase. I joked once to a friend, “It’s a Saturday night. Frank Marshall wants to go out, but Kathy insists on staying home to review proofs of Blauvelt’s book!” Who knows if that happened. The message imparted to me was that she really cared.
The idea that reputationally she’s now seen as being unsupportive of filmmakers and emblematic of everything far-right culture warriors hate, means she’s alienated from both left and right, filmmakers and fans, in an almost impossible-to-imagine way. How did this happen when she really did care?
Maybe she cared too much. Saying that sounds Shakespearean, but it also sounds lot like what happened to Anakin Skywalker. You can care so much about something that you end up making all the wrong decisions until you’ve become the thing you never wanted to be.
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