Kathleen Kennedy quit the Star War

It’s official, after first being reported eleven months ago, Kathleen Kennedy has stepped down as the president of Lucasfilm. As was previously speculated, she is being replaced by not one but two people, with George Lucas’s protégé, Dave Filoni, moving up to president and chief creative officer (he was already the CCO), and president and general manager of business, Lynwen Brennan, becoming co-president alongside Filoni.

Basically, Filoni and Brennan remain in charge of their respective fiefdoms, with Filoni running the creative side of Lucasfilm while Brennan oversees the business side, and they are co-presidents together. (It also lets Filoni be the face of Star Wars, a more welcome visage to the diaper babies who constantly cry about girls in spaaaaaace.)

It’s a similar arrangement to James Gunn and Peter Safran at DC Studios and given the enormous pressure and the sheer scope of productions and creation going on at Lucasfilm, having two people share the load makes the most sense. You don’t need to have one person be a savant of everything, you can let two people work together and take responsibility for the parts they’re best suited for, respectively. Assuming, that is, there is no friction between them.

And there shouldn’t be friction between Filoni and Brennan, as both are long-time Lucasfilm employees. They’ve been working together for years. I assume at least part of the decision to make them co-presidents is to maintain a sense of continuity and stability within Lucasfilm, not exactly a production house known for those things. But letting Kennedy’s exit simmer on the backburner for a year and then following her with two entrenched members of the Lucasfilm stable is the kind of succession planning you do when you want a bloodless transfer of power (basically the opposite of Bob Iger’s search for his own replacement).

In the worst corners of the internet, the worst people are cheering “ding dong the witch is dead”, but there is little reason to expect Star Wars will change materially under this new leadership. In fact, it will almost certainly be a doubling down of nostalgia-driven, Skywalker-obsessed stories, because I’ve heard Dave Filoni is one of the people most determined that there shall be no more Star Wars like Andor, the Best Star War. (Andor: one of the few Star Wars stories that does not involve Filoni at all.) I see no reason to expect anything but pure, unadulterated nostalgia bait that never deviates from characters and/or settings featured in the original or prequel trilogies. The diaper babies will be so happy with their regurgitated space fairy tales!

But first we have to get through the last two pieces of Kathleen Kennedy’s legacy: The Mandalorian and Grogu this summer, and Starfighter next summer. You know what would be hilarious? If they’re both great movies. It would be so f-cking funny if Kathleen Kennedy, after all the sh-t she absorbed from fans over the years, went out on a high note, and saw Star Wars restored to cinematic success.

Of course, knowing these blowhard fans, they would find a way to make it Dave Filoni’s success, even though both Mandalorian and Starfighter were developed and produced under Kennedy’s aegis. I have no doubt that if the movies are good, Kathleen Kennedy will receive no credit, but she will get all the credit if they’re bad. It never really mattered how good or bad her leadership was (it was fine). It was always about the sheer number of boys who were mad a woman was in charge of Star Wars. Well, now they don’t have to worry about that anymore, and Kathleen Kennedy can go on a f-cking vacation.

Source: Hollywood Reporter