Kathleen Kennedy To Exit Lucasfilm At End of 2025

[Monterey Jack]

"Kowtowing to bigoted fans" sums it up. These people are fricking delusional.

[Paul MacLean]

Maybe Amazon can hire her to run the Bond franchise(s).

[mkaroly]

The damage has already been done (as Andy said)...she should have been canned years ago. Too little too late (again, as Andy said).

[Monterey Jack]

Of course, everyone on Twitter is chiding the "incel losers" for cheering her exit, and citing all of the classic films of the past Kennedy had a hand in producing, but...that doesn't change how horribly she ran Star Wars for the past decade. This isn't misogyny, it's based entirely on the mediocrity of the movies and shows under her tenure, and how she and Disney flooded the market with garbage to the point where we actually got sick of Star Wars, a sentence I thought I would never write as a child.

[AndyDursin]

She devalued everything she was involved with. Her involvement with Spielberg classics was not as a creative person but someone who handled the physical production/money/etc. When Disney tabbed her for Lucasfilm brands she became a creative person and her instincts were everywhere -- favoring a heavy feminist agenda, devaluing masculinity, and attempting to open up the audience for those series by appealing to girls. That whole "Force is Female" T-shirt she wore said it all.

There is no way around to see what she was doing there either. Indiana Jones became a tired, weak old man who needed a kick-ass female who had all the answers. Luke Skywalker became a tired, weak old man who needed a kick-ass female who had all the answers. Han Solo became a tired, weak old man who was killed off.

Even the one series that didn't start out that way, THE MANDALORIAN, became infested with it there, too, in its last -- and misfired -- season.

Clearly Kennedy failed. Unless all you are seeing is the bottom line, but even there, it's hard to dispute the diminishing returns she was outputting.

There was such an appetite for Star Wars when Disney first bought Lucasfilm out that she doesn't get credit for the billions the first couple of movies made. ANYTHING would've grossed big money at the box-office. But the failure of those films was the decline in audience and interest, as evidence by the audience there was for SOLO and the last few, busted Star Wars series that nobody cares about.

She also failed twofold -- in failing to appeal to long-time fans, who she alienated, and also kids, who simply don't care. My son could care less about Star Wars. He saw all the movies, he liked Baby Yoda and the Mandalorian when it was in its heyday -- but he has no interest in watching them anymore. Ask him about a new show and he'd rather watch Pokemon or the Minions or How to Train Your Dragon. He doesn't want to revisit the old movies, and judging from the amount of Star Wars Toys on CLEARANCE all over the place (and have been, perpetually, for years) -- her big fail was in failing to cultivate a series legacy for the next generation. The kids, my son and his friends being a good example, just don't give a damn.

STAR WARS is going to need a full-on reset, and with the current political climate at last ridding ourselves of DEI and this feminist POV that infested Kennedy's work, it's probably a good time. But the damage is going to be felt for a long time with this series...and there may not be any way to bring it back to what it used to be. In fact, I know it never will be the same, regardless of who they hire to try and get the ship back on the right track.

[Monterey Jack]

STAR WARS is going to need a full-on reset, and with the current political climate at last ridding ourselves of DEI and this feminist POV that infested Kennedy's work, it's probably a good time. But the damage is going to be felt for a long time with this series...and there may not be any way to bring it back to what it used to be. In fact, I know it never will be the same, regardless of who they hire to try and get the ship back on the right track.

What kills me is they had ONE chance to do a sequel trilogy with the original cast (which is what fans have wanted since the Prequels), and, to quote Robert De Niro...



Now, even if they wanted to wipe the current sequel trilogy from the record and start over again, Carrie Fisher is dead, Harrison Ford is ancient and would want nothing to do with it, and Hamill probably thinks the same. Hell, they never even got all three of them to do one scene together! You'd think that would have been the easiest lay of the entire sequel trilogy, and somehow they fumbled the ball. And, sadly, Disney has invested so deeply in the SW brand that they can't do the one thing that would restore interest in the brand...to let it simmer. The fact that 16 years elapsed between Return Of The Jedi and the Prequels with almost no live-action content produced (aside from a pair of Ewok TV movies) is what made The Phantom Menace so droolingly anticipated. Ditto the decade between Revenge Of The Sith and The Force Awakens, which, at the time, was viewed as a "do-over" for fans who felt burned by the stilted, overly formal tone of the Prequels. And yet, despite how the sh!t about trade route disputes and Jedi Council meetings was often chided as the worst element of the Prequels, what does Disney do? Devote an entire, 24-episode series (Andor) to that very thing! And I know that it's "the most acclaimed D+ SW show of all!", but that didn't translate into ratings success...it's still the least-watched of all the D+ shows, because it's fricking BORING. I couldn't imagine sitting through more than two or three eps as a 12-year-old without wanting to shut it off.

[AndyDursin]

Hell, they never even got all three of them to do one scene together! You'd think that would have been the easiest lay of the entire sequel trilogy, and somehow they fumbled the ball.

That was unforgivable.

And let's not forget the Galactic Starcruiser hotel's spectacular failure, one of the biggest busts in the history of Disney World Imagineering, that also exists as part of Kennedy's legacy. Even the one, reliably successful part of Disney's creative end couldn't make that concept work, or make the "requel trilogy" STAR WARS characters appealing to the masses.

The Galaxy's Edge park concept has also been a disappointment reinforcing that fans aren't drawn to the Disney-created characters. If they had only made a "Tatooine park" at Disney World filled with both old AND new characters from the franchise, it would've been golden. Focusing instead on only the new, they've turned what should've been a sure-fire success into a "meh" experience with only one great ride salvaging it for everyone.