Kathleen Kennedy’s Lucasfilm Legacy: A Galaxy in Disarray | Analysis

Kathleen Kennedy was one with The Force. Until she wasn’t.

And now, at the end of her tenure at Lucasfilm, with current Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni and Lywen Brennan, current president and general manager of Lucasfilm Business, taking over, she leaves behind a complicated legacy of commercial hits, critical darlings, costly misfires and several filmmakers who were hired then fired from a galaxy far, far away.

Kennedy’s tenure at Lucasfilm predates the fateful Disney acquisition of the company in 2012. She was installed months before George Lucas’ shocking $4.05 billion sale and helped shepherd the company following the purchase. But her time at the company has largely been defined by chaos, crucially mismanaging key properties, undercutting creative headway in service of larger corporate priorities, faltering in the properties’ expansion to the company’s theme parks and failing to develop anything genuinely new underneath the larger Lucasfilm umbrella. (It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when Lucasfilm wasn’t just “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones”).

As she leaves the company, “Star Wars,” a brand formerly associated with cinematic experiences that you’d wait hours in line for, has been relegated to an almost exclusively streaming-based franchise trapped in a never-ending morass of online debate and consternation. There have been triumphs, for sure — chief among them Tony Gilroy’s Emmy-winning streaming series “Andor.” But she will largely be remembered for Lucasfilm’s shortcomings and creative stagnation.

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A young Kathleen Kennedy first caught the eye of Steven Spielberg when she was working as an assistant to filmmaker John Milius in the 1970s. Quickly, Spielberg recruited the Northern California native as his own assistant and secretary and brought her along as he made “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” where she met her future husband and business partner Frank Marshall.

Impressed by her ideas, Spielberg upped Kennedy to associate producer on Tobe Hooper’s “Poltergeist” and that same summer she was credited as producer on “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” Thus began a relationship that resulted in Kennedy co-founding Amblin Entertainment at the age of 29, producing nearly every one of Spielberg’s movies and launching her own production company in The Kennedy/Marshall Company.

“It’s not easy being Steven’s producer,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan told NPR in 2015. “Kathy became a genius at handling people.”

In 2012, when Kennedy was wrapping up work on Spielberg’s Oscar-winning “Lincoln,” she was approached by George Lucas. Kennedy thought that he was going to pick her brain about potential replacements to run Lucasfilm, his sprawling media company that includes, among other things, the post-production facility Skywalker Ranch and the industry’s leading visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (founded in 1977 to handle the effects for Lucas’ original “Star Wars”). Instead, he was interested in her for the big job.

“I started to mention a couple of people, and he immediately said, ‘No, no, no. I’m thinking about you doing this,’” Kennedy told Vanity Fair in 2018. She had turned down other studio jobs in the past, but was intrigued by Lucas’ proposition. “I immediately felt this sense of responsibility. And sort of a feeling that I wanted to do this for him as well as myself, because I knew how important it was to him,” Kennedy said at the time.

After she agreed to run the company, Lucas floated the possibility that Lucasfilm would be sold to Disney, and indeed just a few short months later he handed the keys to the company over to Disney for more than $4 billion. It would prove to be a great investment on Disney’s part, considering that the first “Star Wars” movie, produced by Kennedy and released by Disney, made $2.07 billion worldwide.

But complications arose almost immediately.

Best laid plans

Kennedy worked hard to secure her first choice as director of the first new “Star Wars” under her leadership, Brad Bird. At one point there was an elaborate plan where some of the pre- and post-production duties would be handled by a pre-“Jurassic World” Colin Trevorrow so that Bird could make his passion project “Tomorrowland” and the new “Star Wars” movie back-to-back.

When Bird dropped out, opting to focus on “Tomorrowland,” Kennedy turned to J.J. Abrams, with a clear release date in mind – summer 2015 (eventually bumped to winter 2015). Writer Michael Arndt, one of the original creatives recruited for the project, left when it was understood the time constraints would be too limited. Kennedy then brought in Lawrence Kasdan, who had co-written “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” and was a key Lucasfilm legacy figure. Together, Kasdan and Abrams sought to return the franchise to its glory days by essentially remaking the original “Star Wars.”

This would be a pattern that was repeated throughout Kennedy’s tenure – with directors being replaced and projects being announced and then unceremoniously canceled.

There was “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” a risky prequel set directly before the events of 1977’s “Star Wars,” that saw original director Gareth Edwards replaced during post-production with Tony Gilroy and the story radically changed. The firing of Chris Miller and Phil Lord from a “Solo” movie over halfway through production, to be replaced by Ron Howard; the announcement and cancellation of movies from Kevin Feige, Taika Waititi, Josh Trank, Damon Lindelof, Patty Jenkins and a trilogy from the “Game of Thrones” team of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

Other projects were developed but never announced, with word leaking out later that they had been quietly canceled, like a Jabba the Hutt movie from Guillermo del Toro and “The Hunt for Ben Solo,” a new film from Steven Soderbergh that would have seen Adam Driver return to the series to play Kylo Ren.

Even the mainline saga wasn’t free from drama – “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” was a global smash, successfully relaunching the series with the return of Harrison Ford as Han Solo while introducing new characters played by Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Adam Driver.

But fans were split on the decision to kill off Han Solo in the first movie, and there was an even more vitriolic fan response to Rian Johnson’s critically acclaimed “The Last Jedi,” which led to a proposed trilogy from the director to be scuttled. Then the original version of the third film in the sequel trilogy went through a late-in-the-game shift when writer/director Trevorrow was replaced by a returning Abrams, whose resulting “The Rise of Skywalker” ended up being the worst-received film of the three.

Someone who worked with Lucasfilm described Kennedy’s leadership style as stymied by a lack of confidence in her collaborators, as she would grow distrustful, this individual told TheWrap under the condition of anonymity. Unlike Kevin Feige, who has a deep passion for Marvel Comics and big ideas, she served more as an effective, get-it-done producer who got tripped up by creative production.

And after 2019’s critically reviled trilogy-capper “The Rise of Skywalker,” the movies just stopped. Since then the galaxy has felt a lot emptier.

“Star Wars” on TV

Much of this can likely be blamed on the demand for direct-to-consumer Disney+ content. The streaming platform had been earmarked as a huge corporate priority and became the priority as the world shut down due to the COVID pandemic.

Jon Favreau’s “The Mandalorian,” the first-ever live-action “Star Wars” television series, premiered alongside Disney+ in November 2019. It became a sensation and spawned more seasons, a spinoff series (“The Book of Boba Fett”) and, soon to come in May 2026, a made-for-theaters movie.

And Kennedy did give Gilroy the go-ahead for “Andor,” a series that charts the title character in the run-up to the events of “Rogue One” that saw star Diego Luna return. The series, a stark spy thriller about how tyranny takes root, is unquestionably the greatest creative triumph of the Kennedy era. It was also, according to an individual who worked inside Lucasfilm, a series that Filoni disliked.

The other “Star Wars” shows greenlit in this time period mostly faltered, and everything but “The Mandalorian,” “Andor” (which was greenlit with two seasons) and the Filoni-led “Ahsoka” only ran for a single season. Most of the shows were hugely expensive but failed to generate much interest. A live-action “Star Wars” series from Rick Famuyiwa, who directed episodes of “The Mandalorian” and “Ahsoka,” was developed but remains in limbo.

Outside of “Star Wars,” Lucasfilm faltered more severely.

Attempts to get an adaptation of “Children of Blood and Bone,” from Tomi Adeyemi’s YA fantasy novel rooted in African mythology, meant to be a co-production with sister studio 20th Century Studios, sputtered. (Paramount is now making it with a cast that includes Damson Idris, Cynthia Erivo, Idris Elba and Viola Davis.)

An attempt to revitalize “Willow,” this time as a Disney+ series, lasted a single season, and after the show failed to perform, Disney removed it from the platform entirely.

“Throw me the whip”

And then there was “Indiana Jones.” A hugely important property to Lucasfilm and Disney (a new theme park attraction is under construction at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park in Florida), the fifth film was developed by Spielberg (who had directed every other installment) and writer David Koepp. But after Koepp completed a draft, Spielberg got cold feet. Kennedy installed James Mangold in the director’s chair, who worked on a new script with Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. The resulting film, 2023’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” premiered at Cannes, where it was met with a tepid response, and ultimately made just $384 million on a reported budget of $352.3 million.

What’s more, an animated series from Rodrigo Blaas (who had done an episode of “Star Wars” animated anthology series “Visions”), codenamed “Reggie” (after pilot Jock Lindsay’s pet snake from “Raiders of the Ark”), which would see the professor and adventurer get into scraps in stories set in-between the mainline movies, was developed and then canceled. A live-action series, initially developed in 2022, about Abner Ravenwood, Indiana Jones’ mentor and the father of his love Marion, was also scrapped.

When reached for comment on the status of these projects, a Lucasfilm spokesperson declined to discuss projects that are in development.

The world’s greatest, globe-trotting adventurer had, aside from a well-reviewed video game, hung up his hat.

There were other pitfalls and pockmarks that dotted Kennedy’s tenure at Lucasfilm.

The integration of the property into the Disney theme parks has been a particular pain point. The opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a huge, 14-acre, immersive land that opened in the summer of 2019 at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, was beset by budget cuts (courtesy of brief Disney CEO Bob Chapek) and creative second-guessing. It was set in a very specific time period in the series’ canon, in between “The Last Jedi” and “The Rise of Skywalker,” and opted for an earthier approach to themed entertainment. There was, for instance, no music in the land but rather the bleeps and bloops of unseen droids and spacecraft. Plans to give guests “reputations” that would follow them around the land depending on what characters and ideologies they aligned with, were abandoned, as were the plans for various aliens, bounty hunters and robots roaming around the land.

Even worse was the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a $1 billion highly themed hotel experience that split the difference between a live-action-role-playing session and a cruise-on-land. Extravagantly expensive and festooned with next-generation storytelling technology, the Starcruiser opened on March 1, 2022, and closed a little more than a year later. The space, once home to First Order troops and Resistance sympathizers, is now an office building for the Walt Disney Imagineers working on projects like a new “Cars” ride.

In a seeming acknowledgment that the original design just wasn’t working anymore, Disneyland announced that its Star Wars land is getting revamped this week, jettisoning much of the fixed timeline in favor of a looser, everybody’s-invited-to-the-party ethos. And John Williams’ music will finally be played in the land.

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It’s hard to tell how many of the hardships Kennedy navigated during her time at Lucasfilm were inherent to the job and how many arose because the job was always going to be difficult. Following in the footsteps of Lucas, who was seen by many as a true genius and the mastermind of the entire franchise, was always going to be tricky. And even he wasn’t immune from intense fan reaction to his choices, as evidenced by the “Star Wars” prequels.

And for Kennedy, the vocal minority of displeased fans got amplified and intensified online. As the years wore on, too, the corporate culture at Disney became more conservative and risk-averse, leaving many of the more out-there projects marooned and without much-needed support. (The Soderbergh movie, for instance, was approved by Kennedy but shot down by Iger and Alan Bergman.)

During an exit interview with Deadline, Kennedy said that there were a number of scripts that had been delivered, including some by Mangold, Waititi and Donald Glover, who wrote a “Lando” movie that would see him reprising his role from “Solo.” But she said the studio was having trouble giving the go-ahead to riskier projects.

Ultimately, Kennedy’s legacy will be remembered and largely defined by the projects that she did choose to make and champion, bold and original works of art like “The Last Jedi” and “Andor,” and all of the projects that either fell by the wayside or were changed midstream. As a producer, she was powerful and able to accomplish great feats, but ultimately hampered by indecisiveness and creative malaise.

Yoda, the wise old Jedi, once said “do or do not, there is no try.” But it felt like Kennedy’s tenure was made up of trying. And oftentimes not quite making it.

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