Near the end of February, the trades reported two contradictory things about the plans of Kathleen Kennedy, the veteran Hollywood executive who has been running Lucasfilm ever since the company behind Star Wars was purchased by Disney in 2012.
On February 25, Variety, citing earlier reporting from Puck, reported that Kennedy planned to step down as president of Lucasfilm at the end of 2025. One source “with knowledge of her plans” stated that Kennedy would indeed retire at the end of her contract, while another called the report “pure speculation.”
Deadline’s Michael Fleming, two days later, got Kennedy on the record, and reported that the executive “has been working on a succession plan for a couple years, eyeing candidates from within in process with Bob Iger and Alan Bergman.”
“The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies. That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring,” Kennedy said in the interview. She added that she is producing multiple in-progress Star Wars movies, the kind of thing that takes years, and so it doesn’t seem like she’ll be exiting the scene in the near future.
That Kennedy is working on a succession plan with Iger — who has himself been trying to retire for more than a decade, once did step away for a couple of years, yet remains CEO of Disney to this day — might indicate that she’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
A Rocky Tenure
From both a creative and business standpoint, Kennedy’s tenure running Lucasfilm has been a mixed bag. The first Star Wars film of the Disney era, The Force Awakens, is the 5th highest-grossing film of all time. The Last Jedi is, and I will brook no dissent here, a masterpiece.
However, some of the films (most notably The Rise of Skywalker) have been bad, there’s frequently been turmoil behind the scenes, with directors fired, countless announced projects not going forward, and the idea that, with all of those Disney+ shows of varying quality, Star Wars isn’t quite special like it once was. It doesn’t give me much confidence that Shawn Levy, of all directors, is at the helm of a Star Wars film.
That said, as Fleming points out, Kennedy is among the most accomplished producers and executives in the history of the business, someone who “has produced more than 70 films that have collected 120 Oscar nominations and 25 wins.” Her Star Wars movies, alone, have grossed over $6 billion.
And to just about anyone who’s under 30 years old, the first and possibly only thing they think of when they hear Kathleen Kennedy’s name is “Put a chick in it! And make her gay!”:
That is, of course, the 2023 South Park special “Joining the Panderverse,” in which Eric Cartman steps into the role of Kennedy, and the above is her solution to every problem.
It’s a particularly lazy bit of criticism and satire, and it’s guilty of every bit as much pandering as the South Park guys claim Disney is practicing. Its target audience, clearly, is dudes who get really, really angry when a character in a movie is a chick, or gay.
Lazy Criticism
But even that’s fairer than this Substack monstrosity, which declares that “Kathleen Kennedy Is Everything Americans Loathe About Their Elites, and commits about five major factual errors just in the opening paragraphs, before repeating a ludicrous “unconfirmed rumor this week says that Disney has been trying to sell Star Wars.” Yea, if Star Wars was for sale, I get the sense there would be some interest. Also… I think this person thinks Kathleen Kennedy is related to THE Kennedys? (she is not.)
I trust Kathleen Kennedy’s instincts about Star Wars much more than I do that idiot’s.
I wrote the following in this space in 2018, after the release of The Last Jedi, and I think it holds up:
For a very long time, Star Wars fandom meant a certain thing: Fans, mostly male, who grew up in the ‘70s or early ‘80s and experienced all or part of the original trilogy on a big screen either as small children or as teenagers, considering them foundational texts of their film appreciation and their childhoods themselves. These people, who grew up watching the original films over and over again on VHS and later DVD, were disappointed by the special editions of the late ‘90s, were outraged by the prequels, and have had mixed reactions to The Force Awakens and other Disney-era Star Wars films… Four decades worth of younger fans have discovered and appreciated these movies over time, watching the existing and new films at their own pace, and sometimes discovering the saga through the Clone Wars or Rebels TV series. And the younger viewers’ opinions about specific matters of contention may not match those of their parents, or some cases, their grandparents.
Young people, today, might hate Kathleen Kennedy, for no reason other than South Park told them to. But however long she sticks around, if you know her name, it should be for better things than that.
