[COLUMN] Does It Even Matter Who Runs LucasFilm After Kathleen Kennedy? | by Darren Mooney

(Editor's Note: Conflicting reports regarding Kathleen Kennedy's retirement dropped after this story was written, but it doesn't change the points that Darren makes whatsoever.)

Earlier this week, Puck reported that Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy was planning to retire this year, at the age of 71.

On one hand, this isn’t unexpected. Much has been written about “the grey ceiling”, how modern Hollywood is dominated by older producers and studio heads. Bob Iger retired from running Disney at the age of 69, only to return at the age of 71. Younger executives feel a “big squeeze”, unable to progress and modernize the industry. In that sense, it’s probably good to see a seasoned professional standing aside and presumably making room for new blood.

Still, it feels strange that the news about Kennedy arrives just a week after it was announced that Barbara Broccoli had surrendered creative control of the James Bond franchise to Amazon. Once again, Broccoli was a veteran producer. She is seven years younger than Kennedy, at 64 years of age, but she still has a long and storied career. The announcement of Broccoli’s departure caught a lot of observers by surprise, as many assumed Amazon would have to pry the property from her hands.

It is perhaps an understatement to describe Kennedy’s stewardship of the Star Wars brand as chaotic and uneven. On the one hand, Kennedy has overseen commercial and creative triumphs. The Force Awakens is still the highest-grossing movie of all-time at the domestic box office. The Last Jedi is one of the most important (and, frankly, best) blockbusters of the 21st century, and proof that an artist’s sensibility could survive in the modern commercial context. Andor is a masterpiece.

However, for all of these successes, there was also – frankly – a lot of “content.” If The Last Jedi felt like a thesis statement on the potential for a cohesive artistic statement in the modern studio framework, Solo: A Star Wars Story and The Rise of Skywalker felt like the opposite. They were soulless, anonymous, pandering messes that seemed to usher in an era of those sorts of films from The Flash to Captain America: Brave New World.

Kennedy was directly responsible for many of these bad calls. Kennedy, for example, defended the franchise’s leap across the nostalgia event horizon, by choosing to interpret audiences’ rejection of Solo not as a rejection of a completely pointless and unnecessary prequel, but specifically as a rejection of the idea of recasting, how she “should have recognized” that the franchise needed to bring back more old actors, which gave us computer-generated Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).

Similarly, Kennedy would often clash with creatives by making very ill-judged decisions based on her assumptions of what the audience wanted. Kennedy demanded a heavy retool of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the miniseries from Oscar-winning writer Hossein Amini, arguing that the story should be “a hopeful, uplifting story” that just happened to unfold in a period where the title character (Ewan McGregor) was living in exile after a genocide and the betrayal of his best friend (Hayden Christensen).

Indeed, one of the more interesting recurring trends of Kennedy’s stewardship of the Star Wars brand was her willingness to make bold and interesting creative choices, and then pull back from them extremely quickly towards the middle of the road. She hired Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to make Solo, which could have been one of the most interesting franchise films of the decade, only to get cold feet during production, fire them and replace them with the safest choice, Ron Howard.

Kennedy greenlit a trilogy of Star Wars movies by Rian Johnson, but failed to make them materialize. Even Andor seemed to happen by accident. According to Tony Gilroy, Kennedy reached out to him after his salvage work on Rogue One, and asked him to pitch the project. He pitched it. The pitch scared Kennedy away. The official response was, reportedly, “we’re not doing that.” Kennedy seems to have then gone to Stephen Schiff, only to return to Gilroy’s original pitch when Schiff’s second (and likely more generic) attempt at Andor fell through.

It’s worth pausing to note here that Kennedy is, quite frankly, an incredible producer who has enjoyed an incredible career. She spent a lot of her time in Hollywood working alongside Steven Spielberg, producing classics like E.T. and Jurassic Park. She was handpicked by George Lucas. Kennedy’s career is built around two poles that intersect with Spielberg: a strong eye for creative talent and a desire to please the audience. Her best decisions managing Star Wars prioritized the former. Reflecting the general trend in contemporary Hollywood, her weakest instincts reflected a desire to pander to fans.

There has been an interesting shift in Hollywood over the past decade, trying to move creative control of these sorts of projects (which take up an increasing amount of space in the market) away from filmmakers. It has become a lot harder for genuine auteurs to make big budget crowd pleasing blockbusters. There is a tendency to treat the directors of franchise films as “more shooter than auteur.” Warner Bros. has made a point to “avoid auteur directors who want final cut” since around 2017.

Creative power has shifted away from creatives and towards executives. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe has an auteur, it is Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige. “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie,” explained Nia DaCosta, the director of The Marvels. “So I think you live in that reality, but I tried to go in with the knowledge that some of you is going to take a back seat.” This shift in power arguably strengthened the role of figures like Kennedy and Broccoli.

Certainly, Broccoli had her share of creative clashes. Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle left the project that would become No Time To Die over “creative disagreements”, which is interesting given how radical No Time to Die ended up being in its approach to James Bond (Daniel Craig). Christopher Nolan reportedly expressed an interest in directing the Bond movie following No Time to Die, but that deal fell through because Broccoli refused to grant him final cut.

This is why James Gunn’s ascent to the head of the DC arm of Warner Bros. is so interesting, because Gunn seems like the rare major studio executive who actually understands the importance of creativity within the creative process. That said, Gunn has yet to release his first film under that studio brand, and the commercial turmoil embroiling Warner Bros. makes it hard to believe that he’ll get to see his plans come to fruition, but it is the most interesting creative move in modern Hollywood.

However, it feels like this trend has only accelerated in recent years. Over the past decade, there has been a clear shift in power away from the directors making individual films to the super producers overseeing entire franchises. Now, it seems like there has been even greater consolidation in the hands of the corporate owners of these studios. The person sending out the casting call for the new James Bond wasn’t an executive at Amazon Studios, it was Jeff Bezos himself.

It is perhaps fanciful to imagine that Jeff Bezos might personally set the direction of the James Bond franchise, but this is the same week that he made it clear that he was setting the editorial line at The Washington Post. The mere existence of Rings of Power, the most expensive television show ever made, reportedly stemmed from a five-word edict from Bezos: “Bring me Game of Thrones.” Bezos personally saved The Expanse, and then just as quickly forgot about it.

This does feel like a realignment, particularly in the context of statements by executives like Bob Iger that his creatives “need to be entertaining”, and removing any personality from their work. It feels like the shift has only accelerated. First, power moved from creatives to the producers who tried to balance creativity with the demands of the money men. Now, it seems like even the extremely compromised creative choices of those producers are too wild for the money men.

After all, if Kathleen Kennedy, the producer behind crowd-pleasing creative triumphs like E.T. and Jurassic Park couldn’t balance the competing demands of creative vision and content cultivation, what chance would any successor have. The internet is speculating heavily that Kennedy might be replaced by the logical choices of Kevin Feige, Jon Favreau and/or Dave Filoni. For all of Kennedy’s faults, that’s a really depressing slate of candidates.

After all, like Kennedy, Feige has had to deal with the creative and commercial decline of his own creative brand – the Marvel Cinematic Universe – since around 2019. Are Brave New World and The Marvels really any better or worse than The Book of Boba Fett or Skeleton Crew? Similarly, Favreau seems like a lovely guy, but is a company man to his core. Is the director of the “live action” remake of The Lion King really a guy to be trusted with this? And Filoni… well, Filoni made Ahsoka.

Similarly, for all the bad choices that Broccoli made with the James Bond brand, turning down Nolan and Boyle, it seems fair to assume that Amazon would never allow even the modest creative ambition of No Time to Die, which dared to imagine Bond as an absentee father who makes the ultimate sacrifice. That was a bold creative choice, and it is largely absent from so much modern franchise culture, which is increasingly about maps and macguffins and lore and continuity.

If Kathleen Kennedy could not thread the needle between producing competent creative-led entertainment and the increasingly commonplace belief among executives and fans that art shouldn’t be burdened by anything as gauche as a perspective, what chance does any successor have? Broccoli made her mistakes managing the James Bond franchise, but they were her mistakes, borne of her own choices rather than fear of some imaginary audience. If Kennedy didn’t have the power to see through her early commitment to letting talented people make good media, it doesn’t really matter who heads LucasFilm.

The most charitable assessment of Kennedy’s stewardship of the Star Wars brand will be that it was “mixed” at best. However, any clear-eyed understanding of what Kennedy’s departure means for the Star Wars franchise will also accept that it is unlikely to lead to a raising of the proverbial bar. Kennedy’s retirement doesn’t make empty inoffensive synergistic content like The Book of Boba Fett, the later seasons of The Manadalorian, Ahsoka or Obi-Wan Kenobi any less likely.

It just removes any chance of something as interesting and worthwhile as The Last Jedi or Andor.