Change is afoot in the Star Wars universe.
Puck is reporting that Kathleen Kennedy will step down from running LucasFilm at the end of the year.
Kennedy has been running LucasFilm for 14 years. She was responsible for the Disney Star Wars movies, the spin offs, and TV shows.
There had been rumors, for almost five years, that Kennedy would be getting the boot, but it never materialized, and if anything the Star Wars brand has continued to decline since then.
Back in 2022, you had a Business Insider piece practically begging Bob Iger to do something, anything, to steer the Star Wars ship back on track. It didn’t help that the last Star Wars movie was 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker” and the franchise’s next film, “The Mandalorian and Groku,” is only coming in 2026. That’s seven years of inactivity.
In August 2024, insider Matt Belloni asked around but “nobody at Disney seem[ed] to have a good answer for why Kathy’s still there.” Belloni got a lot of “she was George’s choice” type of answers, but most seemed bewildered by her continuing tenure as the overseer of all things “Star Wars”
This past May, George Lucas told a Cannes audience that Kennedy had “lost” the Star Wars ideas that he had given to her.
“I was the one who really knew what “Star Wars” was…who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The force, for example, nobody understood the force,” said Lucas. “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”
For 14 years, Kennedy has presided over the Star Wars brand and has borne the wrath of fanboys, especially when it comes to the recent trilogy of films that reinvented the lore of the franchise.
While Marvel Studios, Pixar, Disney Pictures and even 20th Century Studios enjoyed a successful box office comeback last year, Kennedy’s disastrous tenure as LucasFilm president continued on. Lucasfilm is the only Disney studio that hasn’t had a major success in recent years. They’ve been consistently releasing Disney+ shows with middling reviews and viewership.
Kennedy’s departure was a long time coming.
Following “Air,” this is Affleck’s latest stint behind the camera. He has cast himself in the lead role, alongside Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun, and Gillian Anderson (“The X-Files”).