Kathleen Kennedy: The End of an Era?
A collective cheer went up on Tuesday as the remaining disaffected but hopeful Star Wars fans read the news that Kathleen Kennedy is probably retiring. But the cheer wasn’t that loud. Not as loud as you’d think after years of fans calling for the Lucasfilm boss’s ouster. In fact, the majority of the responses I’ve read across various platforms since then expressed skepticism at best and apathy at worst.
Now skepticism I can understand. People have been predicting Kennedy’s fall from grace for years now, and nothing’s ever come of it. If anything, the fact she’s still the boss despite Lucasfilm’s many failures during her tenure has only solidified her as an immovable object within the Disney ecosystem and Hollywood. Most don’t think she’s going anywhere until she decides to. And they’re probably right.
But apathy as a response to a possible shakeup at the studio that produced the Star Wars franchise is harder to fathom. I was around when the prequels came out. I witnessed the debates, arguments, and flame wars. Star Wars fans are often branded as toxic, but you can’t say they aren’t passionate. This franchise left an indelible mark on my generation. It influenced culture in ways that we probably don’t even understand. People made it their mission to write, make movies, and create art because of their experiences with Star Wars as kids. Love of this…thing has been passed down for multiple generations now. Grown men wept when Luke Skywalker showed up in the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian. If your fandom survived the prequels, it’s hard to imagine anything turning you away from this franchise.
But somehow that’s exactly what has happened. Somehow, the thing fans have been asking for since about an hour after The Last Jedi came out looks to finally be happening and most of them…don’t care?
Fan Apathy
Well, there’s no need to overcomplicate this. The simple answer is no, they don’t care. Because Lucasfilm made them not care. Either by telling them they didn’t want them as customers or by producing subpar content. And then telling them they were bad people when they didn’t like that subpar content. Those that didn’t get pissed and decide to boycott were just worn down by mediocrity and by the constant message, delivered both implicitly and explicitly–This isn’t for you. Well everyone has their tipping point. No one has to waste time watching stuff they don’t like. And in 2025, there’s more stuff out there to watch than anyone could get around to watching in several lifetimes–especially if you include user-generated content on sites like YouTube.
So people moved on. To shows like The Expanse. Or to older shows and movies that they never got around to watching. Or to older shows and movies that they’d seen before but decided to watch again. They went back to the old EU novels. To old video games. Old comic books. Whatever it was. They found other ways to amuse themselves.
Kathleen Kennedy finally deciding to retire isn’t going to change that. Some may come back, sure. If things improve. (I’ll come back to this.) But most won’t. Most are gone for good. In the same way that Covid taught us that there are things we can live without, Star Wars taught fans that they could skip this show or that book or video game and life would go on. It’s not like they would miss out on the water cooler talk, because no one’s talking about these Star Wars shows. Hell, hardly anyone’s watching them.
But let’s just say for the sake of argument that Kennedy does actually retire and some rockstar is brought in to replace her. Someone that wants to make stuff that fans will love. Someone that knows Star Wars. Someone that loves it.
Favloni to Replace Kathleen Kennedy?
I don’t know who that person would be, frankly. Dave Filoni’s name has been thrown out. But his stock has fallen far since that turd of a third season of The Mandalorian aired. And Ashoka did nothing to convince fans Filoni had the chops to take on these kinds of projects on his own.
Jon Favreau being promoted to top dog might win some fans back, but I think a lot of people have lost faith in him also due to the drop in quality of The Mandalorian from season 2 to season 3. Maybe Favloni as a pair would balance each other out, but at the end of the day, these two guys are creatives–not executives–and are probably not ideal candidates to run a studio.
But never mind who they pick. Let’s just stipulate that the replacement is awesome. In all the right ways. And they have the absolute best intentions for Star Wars. They want to tell great Star Wars stories. Give the fans what they want but also give them some of what they had no idea they needed. And let’s say these ideas are all amazing and that this new superhero president of Lucasfilm could make Star Wars great again.
Franchise Reboot
This person would have to gut the company and essentially rebuild it. Fire all of the people who prioritize anything else above telling great Star Wars stories. Fire the ones who were on social media shitting on fans for not liking a show. Fire all of the people who know nothing about Star Wars and, worse, don’t care about it.
And then comes the really impossible task. This new super duper amazing rockstar superhero president of Lucasfilm would have to decanonize the sequel trilogy and essentially reboot the franchise. Because no matter who they replace Kathleen Kennedy with, and no matter what amazing new shows and movies and books and comics they might turn out, if at the end of the day all roads still lead to The Rise of Skywalker–the fans who left ain’t coming back. Because that…trilogy took a giant steaming shit all over the thing the entire franchise is built around and the thing that many longtime fans are protective over: the Skywalker saga.
But even if all of that were to happen, that still doesn’t guarantee Star Wars would be great again. Because as much as I think Kennedy has mismanaged Lucasfilm’s brands, we don’t really know what has gone on behind the scenes. We have no idea how much meddling there has been from Disney, from Bob Iger, etc. Has Kennedy truly been fully in the driver’s seat? Is the state of the studio simply down to her mismanagement? Because if it’s not and she leaves, Disney still owns Lucasfilm. And Bob Iger is still in charge at Disney, and who knows when he’ll depart those sunny shores. And if he’s had his thumb on the scale even a little bit, how is Kathleen Kennedy retiring going to change that?
But it doesn’t really matter, because none of that is ever going to happen. And Star Wars will never be great again. As that famous bard from the great nation of Texas said: “Turn out the lights. The party’s over.”