Happy Sunday, and welcome to a new edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away“. And this is no regular edition, so we’ll get right into it very quickly. As you might have heard by now, Kathleen Kennedy bid Lucasfilm farewell this week — an apt end for a week in which we had barely posted four articles by the time the news dropped on Thursday afternoon (Pacific time).
Tyler and Tom discussed the news on Thursday’s SWNN Live!, and we’ve also talked about it quite a bit on our Discord server, which you can join here. (And while we’re plugging, check out Josh’s Character Spotlight on Merrin — though I’m not going near this one until I finish Jedi: Survivor!)
A quick detour, and we’ll get started.
Three Things That May Have Flown Casual
General updates: We’ll discuss the big Kathy Kennedy announcement below, but with it, came some general updates on the franchise. Long story short: the Dawn of the Jedi movie may no longer be a thing, while movies from Taika Waititi and Donald Glover are still alive — for now. Simon Kinberg had to redo his entire outline for his trilogy last year. And Rick Famuyiwa had a show in development at one point, according to a report from TheWrap. Could this be that “Ghost Track 17” show we never heard about?Yub nub: The original trilogy is coming to Galaxy’s Edge.Dropping mics: Have you seen how Legacy of Vader wrapped its 12-issue series? That deserves its own column — or, you know, you can also read Sydney’s review here.
LONDON, ENGLAND – APRIL 07: James Mangold, Dave Filoni, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy onstage during the studio panel at Star Wars Celebration 2023 in London at ExCel on April 07, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Kate Green/Getty Images for Disney)
A New Era At Lucasfilm Begins
We all knew it was gonna happen this week. I was keeping an eye on my emails and refreshing Twitter during the first hours of the US morning, which is when these things typically drop. Finally, on Thursday afternoon, the bomb dropped on us — and it was exactly what had been reported. But of course, the interesting thing wasn’t going to come from the StarWars.com article. We’ll get to that.
Kathleen Kennedy is currently out as Lucasfilm President, and starting Monday, Dave Filoni will continue his duties as Chief Creative Officer, and also serve as President, with Lynwen Brennan serving as co-President. Last week, I had posed five questions I was hoping the news announcement would answer; the first one was related to the delegation of duties. Nothing specific was revealed, which may hint at the fact that they haven’t really figured it out yet. For now, we know that Filoni is in charge of the creative side, and Brennan is in charge of the business side. The center of the Venn diagram will be something for them to resolve as they go along.
Let’s start with Brennan. She’s been working at the company longer than Filoni, over 25 years. What’s especially interesting about her is her ILM background. She rose through the ranks at the VFX company, which means she’s no Harvard MBA just looking at cutting costs and looking good for shareholders; she has also dealt with creatives and gotten her hands dirty, to a certain extent. But what is also important is that her attachment to this company will allow her to fight for it. Kennedy was one of the guardians of ILM at Disney, and she fought as hard to keep the integrity of that company as she did the rest of Lucasfilm. Having someone from the inside will be beneficial for us all, especially in a time when AI is threatening the visual effects industry in the way that it is.
Filoni, we all know at this point. The internet is split on his appointment, with a significant portion concerned that we’re just going to see a decade’s worth of projects led by animated characters from The Clone Wars across live-action or animation, and the rest arguing against that notion. For now, I’m giving him (the two of them, of course) the benefit of the doubt. But Filoni’s track record does suggest that there is reason for concern. Even when he was paired up with Jon Favreau to create something “original” within the Star Wars galaxy, he ended up spinning the whole thing into setting up (and executing) a Rebels sequel series.
Can he deliver anything meaningful outside of this timeline? We still haven’t seen anything that he developed as CCO from the beginning; The Mandalorian and Grogu will be our first. And outside of the MandoVerse, we’ll have to wait until next year’s Starfighter. (Perhaps Maul: Shadow Lord had not entered development by the end of 2023, when he was promoted.) And no, I’m not giving any credit to TheWrap‘s reporting that he “disliked” Andor — which is why we didn’t include it in our story covering that article, even before Lucasfilm’s denial.
Of course, Filoni has been in the room discussing the development of many projects over the past few years. And we know that he’s interested in pursuing stories beyond The Rise of Skywalker: He was involved in Damon Lindelof’s assignment of an elder Rey movie, as well as the development of Starfighter, which takes place five years after Rey’s defeat of Palpatine, and the hiring of Simon Kinberg, who is launching the franchise into a new era. And maybe he isn’t that interested in the past, as the icing of James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi might suggest. (We’ll leave the autopsy of what happened there for another day, but this is certainly a possibility.)
LONDON, ENGLAND – APRIL 07: Dave Filoni, Daisy Ridley and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy onstage during the studio panel at the Star Wars Celebration 2023 in London at ExCel on April 07, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Kate Green/Getty Images for Disney)
And under his guidance, Lucasfilm has kept trying to make the Rey movie from Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy happen. Even after Steven Knight left the project, the company went so far as to hire another writer. And yet, Kathleen Kennedy didn’t even bring it up in her exit interview. It’s possible that she just forgot, and when I pressed Lucasfilm about this, they insisted that the interview wasn’t meant to be “exhaustive” of the full development slate — and yet, Deadline‘s Mike Fleming doubled down and asked Kennedy if she was forgetting any projects, and she didn’t mention the Rey movie. We’ll let this one pass for now, as I do believe it was a slip-up (she had no qualms in confirming that Dawn of the Jedi is DOA, or that Lando is very much alive, for instance), but I do believe it was indicative of how low a priority that movie is for them at the moment.
During that Deadline interview, Fleming asked precisely the question that I was hoping he would: What are Kennedy’s biggest regrets at the company? And she gave an answer that surprised me quite a bit, honestly: the making of Solo. And she says it wasn’t because of the movie and how it turned out, but rather the idea from the beginning, as it was “too soon”. Again: too much to unpack here for a single article. We’ll come back to this at some point…
There are not many Kathy Kennedy takes you haven’t read by now, so I won’t be promising to write something that will finally open up your eyes. The truth is, my own feelings are complicated. She oversaw and still champions one of the best Star Wars movies I’ve seen in The Last Jedi, and then followed it up with one of the worst, in The Rise of Skywalker. She was incapable of putting a new movie into production for nearly six years, but she also went to war so that Tony Gilroy could make the most impactful and most moving Star Wars story this side of Return of the Jedi.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 15: (L-R) Tony Gilroy, Kathleen Kennedy and Diego Luna arrive at the special 3-episode launch event for Lucasfilm’s original series Andor at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California on September 15, 2022. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)
To the new leadership, I would ask the same thing Bob Iger told Kathy when she took over: Be bold. That is a great piece of advice that Iger himself should apply to Disney at the moment. Do not capitulate to the fans if something doesn’t work. Believe in the movies you are making and the stories you are telling. These things will outlive us, so they must endure the test of time, not the TikTok algorithm.
Filoni and Brennan will not have the same leeway Kennedy had under Disney. They will have to justify their titles at the company, and they are already eager to sink their teeth into that precious development slate. I do believe that some of the titles Kennedy mentioned as being in active development will go into carbonite over the next 12 months, and other movies will get fast-tracked. My biggest curiosity for how the new management will handle things actually relates to something not many people have discussed — at least none that I’ve seen. And that is the issue of communications.
Under Kennedy, Lucasfilm managed to announce over half a dozen movies that never even got to pre-production: movies from Josh Trank, Rian Johnson, Kevin Feige, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Patty Jenkins, and (possibly) James Mangold were axed very early in the process after getting the fireworks ready for the announcements; not to mention other ones for which the jury’s still out — those from Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Taika Waititi, Donald Glover, and even Dave Filoni himself. Many others made their way into the press way earlier than they were supposed to.
And yet, for all the transparency she had while announcing projects, Lucasfilm also kept many other cards close to the chest. Filoni is a walking version of J.J. Abrams’ “mystery box” marketing tool, so I imagine the number of official announcements will be brought down significantly. He’s been overseeing the MandoVerse with Jon Favreau, and has been able to keep the leaks to a minimum — remember when they managed to keep a Boba Fett show in secret until two weeks before they started filming?!
But at some point, the new leadership will have to tell everyone who’s the boss now, and announce their own slate — or at least part of it. What is happening to the Disney Plus pipeline after this year’s Ahsoka Season 2? And what about all of the movies we’ve been talking about today? I don’t expect a full press conference like James Gunn and Peter Safran had in their early days at DC Studios, and I’ll definitely give them a few months to figure out what they’re doing. Maybe it will be good to announce what the next five years of Star Wars will look like during Star Wars Celebration 2027, while commemorating 50 years of a galaxy far, far away.
What did you think of the latest edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away”? Let me know your thoughts and suggestions down below in the comment section. You can also send them, or reach out with any information tips, directly via our Contact page.
Have a great week!
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.