Star Wars Is Making a Huge Mistake With Kathleen Kennedy’s Very Well-Known Replacement

Star Wars fans have always been difficult to please, at least partially because George Lucas insisted on doing exclusively what he wanted to do for so long (including but not limited to: Greedo shooting first, midi-chlorians, and burying the theatrical editions), and nobody is more aware of how hard it is to run Star Wars than Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Tasked with leading the iconic studio after Lucas sold it to Disney, Kennedy has bravely allowed herself to be the face of Lucasfilm — celebrating its triumphs and weathering its missteps. Now, it looks like her somewhat divisive run at the company is approaching its end, with Puck News reporting that she’ll soon be stepping down and handing control of the company over to Lynwen Brennan (from the business side) and current chief creative officer (and Star Wars Rebels creator) Dave Filoni.

Unfortunately, this could easily end up being a terrible mistake for the future of Star Wars. Granted, it makes a lot of sense on paper: Both Filoni and Brennan come from the executive side of Lucasfilm, so they’re already involved at the company, and Filoni in particular has been professionally invested in Star Wars since Lucas handpicked him to work on the Clone Wars cartoon 20 years ago. It also sounds similar to the setup that James Gunn and Peter Safran have now at Warner Bros. for their DC Studios label, with a creative person and a business person both making decisions at the top. It seems to be going alright for them, with Gunn's Superman being their first release.

Who Is Kathleen Kennedy, and What Has She Done for Star Wars?

Casual movie fans may have only become aware of Kennedy once the Disney era of Star Wars began, but she didn’t just appear, fully-formed, like baby Anakin. Before Lucasfilm, she produced a film for a guy named Steven Spielberg called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and then co-founded Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment (along with her future husband, producer Frank Marshall). She has producer (or executive producer, or associate producer) credits on Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Schindler’s List, The Sixth Sense, and Raiders of the Lost Ark — which is to say that you’d have a hard time making a list of the best movies of all time without including one that she worked on.

Her Star Wars run has been undeniably rocky, and the proverbial buck absolutely stops with her, but she did bring the franchise from the post-Revenge of the Sith wasteland to the heights of its The Force Awakens-era resurgence. That movie is still the highest-grossing film of all time in the United States, by a pretty wide margin, and its record will likely stand for the foreseeable future unless Avengers: Doomsday can really overcome superhero fatigue as much as Disney needs it to. However you feel about the creative direction that Disney Star Wars took after that, she definitely brought the franchise back and made it a big deal again.

Why Are Kathleen Kennedy’s Star Wars Replacements a Mistake?

For all of the (largely under-appreciated) good that Kennedy has done for Star Wars, a lot of fans would prefer to give most of the credit to Dave Filoni. After all, his work on Clone Wars, Rebels, and most of the other Star Wars TV shows has helped to regain the confidence of a lot of fans by legitimizing some of the — we mean this in a nice way — nerdier aspects of the mythology. He takes the weird stuff seriously, which is good when you’re tasked with expanding a sci-fi universe like this.

But TV shows are not what’s important to Star Wars, movies are, and Filoni — unlike Kathleen Kennedy, who has one of the all-time great cinematic resumes — is completely unproven when it comes to movies. He’s directing something, but we don’t know what it is, and he co-wrote Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, but we don’t know if audiences will be more enthusiastic about that than they were about the last few seasons of the Mandalorian TV show. That’s the other side of the coin with Filoni: Just like how Kennedy was there for the good days and bad days of the movies, Filoni was also there for The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka, two of the poorer examples of Star Wars’ foray into television.

“But what about Andor?” you may be saying, “Andor was one of the best Star Wars things ever, and it was a TV show!” Well, Filoni didn’t work on Andor — not to the extent that he got credited, at least. But do you know who was a producer on Andor and Rogue One, the movie it was a spin-off of? Kathleen Kennedy. Far from an indication that she’s infallible, because she’s not (she presumably signed off on everything in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), this is merely a reminder that she’s not as easily replaceable as some people may wish she were.