Intro for February 27, 2025

Dear Gossips,  

In 2012, Kathleen Kennedy was named co-chair of LucasFilm alongside George Lucas. Then, when Lucas sold his company to Disney, Kennedy was promoted to sole president of LucasFilm. Ever since then, Kathleen Kennedy has been the top dog at LucasFilm. Now, though, her reign is rumored to be ending as Kennedy is expected to retire by the end of the year (the news was first reported in Puck). Long a target for fan ire—and outright misogynistic hatred—the internet was rife with cheers at the news that Kennedy will step down.

Kennedy’s tenure at LucasFilm is a mixed bag. She oversaw Star Wars’ successful return to theaters in 2015 with The Force Awakens…but also oversaw the franchise’s floundering finish just four years later with The Rise of Skywalker. At the same time, she was at the helm as LucasFilm blazed onto TV with The Mandalorian…but she was also at the helm through a progression of worse shows that tarnished the Star Wars brand (the same pressure to fill the Disney+ content firehose hurt Marvel, too). LucasFilm brought in billions under her watch, but it also saw both Indiana Jones and Star Wars depreciate with audiences. 

But like with Meghan Markle, it’s impossible to have a reasonable conversation about Kathleen Kennedy on the internet. There is so much bad faith criticism of Kennedy that even the most grounded critique gets absorbed into over-the-top hollering about a girl getting her cooties on Star Wars. The fair criticisms of Kennedy are led by what might shape her lasting legacy—cold feet. Throughout her tenure, LucasFilm would announce big, starry projects, such as new Star Wars films from Taika Waititi, Kevin Feige, David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, and Rian Johnson, only to see the projects cancelled. 

Never mind the mid-production turmoil on Solo, in which original directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller were fired and replaced by Ron Howard, who substantially re-worked the film. The same happened to Rogue One, in which original director Gareth Edwards was sidelined in favor of Tony Gilroy. At least in Rogue One’s case, they were able to pull together something that halfway worked and that film went on to earn a billion dollars, but Solo flopped, becoming the first Star War to lose money in theaters. 

But success or failure, it never mattered, there were a lot of people who wanted to see her fail from the jump, just because she’s a woman. It is that simple. I was there in 2012, I remember all the “who’s she” posting going on when she was announced as the president of LucasFilm following the Disney merger. A lot of people didn’t know she produced some of the biggest hits of the Eighties and Nineties, that she was Spielberg’s go-to producer for years, and that her elevation to a leadership role at a company like LucasFilm made perfect sense. In the 2010s, people would get mad if you suggested the anti-Kennedy sentiment was fueled by misogyny, pointing out all her failures…while ignoring her successes.

But it’s 2025, can we now admit Kathleen Kennedy faced an undue amount of scrutiny because she’s a woman working in a male-dominated space? Fans constantly called for her to be fired, even as LucasFilm’s sister company, Marvel, started to flounder and absolutely no one called for the firing of Kevin Feige. In fact, after several years of decline at Marvel, people are now supporting Kevin Feige to replace Kennedy at LucasFilm! (That was viable a few years ago, now Feige is knee-deep in trying to get Marvel back on track.)

Kathleen Kennedy will probably be remembered most for her cold feet, and that’s fair. But the other side of that is that occasionally, her cold feet led to something good, like entrusting Tony Gilroy with a television spin-off of Rogue One. Andor is a spectacular piece of television in its own right, and the best Star War since The Empire Strikes Back. Andor’s second season is coming in April, and it looks incredible. 

 

Will Kathleen Kennedy get any credit for Andor? Probably not, even though Gilroy was hired and given the greenlight for a TV series on her watch. The reality is that Kathleen Kennedy did an okay job. Yes, there have been problems, divided pretty evenly between Kennedy’s cold feet and pressure from higher up at Disney to fill the content firehose, but the highs are incredibly high, like Andor. And there isn’t a solid successor in place to guarantee that LucasFilm will run any smoother under someone else. But it doesn’t matter. The worst fans will welcome whoever is next with open arms…unless Disney hires another woman. Protect Emma Watts at all costs. 

Live long and gossip,

Sarah