Lucasfilm has been creatively bankrupt for years.
A brief Corner note on the necromantic: Variety reported today that Hollywood executive Kathleen Kennedy — president of Lucasfilm and thus the inheritor of creative decision-making authority over both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movie franchises — would be retiring from her position at the end of 2025. The announcement comes a mere 13 years too late to save Lucasfilm and the moviegoing world, which would have been far better off had she never taken the reins in the first place back in 2012, when Lucasfilm was gobbled up in a blockbuster acquisition by Disney. Que será, será.
What is there to say to summarize her disastrous reign? Kennedy oversaw the complete exhaustion of the creative energies and brand equities of two of the crown jewels of modern American film. I don’t want to get into a Critical Drinker–like rant about the decline of these beloved movie series from my youth; the piece would run 2,500 words and it’s too early in the afternoon to be that inebriated in any event. So I’ll note only that she squandered an enormously popular creative legacy of a series that didn’t have to die.
Let us grant that Kennedy was dealing with the inescapable reality that the Indiana Jones franchise is uniquely tied to one specific actor (Harrison Ford), which limited its value — unless you think the public would tolerate AI-ndiana Jones. But Star Wars? It was control over the Star Wars franchise that was truly meant to justify Disney’s plunking down an eye-widening $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm.
Star Wars was going to be the gift that creatively and financially kept on giving. Think of the possibilities! The worlds to explore, the stories to tell! More important, it was figured to be a virtual money-minting machine for Disney. A new trilogy was promised to us back then — a sequel trilogy, praise be, instead of Lucas’s bizarrely inert prequels. There would be TV shows! Spin-off films from the Star Wars universe! The world was about to get all the Star Wars content it was assumed they craved.
And here we are. I’m sure that when many of my readers think about Kennedy’s influence on the Star Wars franchise in its various film and television incarnations their thoughts turn to “wokeness” and the like; I agree that an insufferable strain of modern Hollywood progressivism has infected everything out of Lucasfilm for a while now, but not in any particularly outstanding way. The wokeness aspect to Kennedy’s reign at Lucasfilm is a red herring: controversial and easy clickbait but not really the reason why she went bust with a beloved creative franchise which she was handpicked to steward.
When I say “went bust” mind that I mean artistically and not necessarily financially. I’m sure Lucasfilm isn’t going broke, after all. But I doubt that a single person paying attention — even the many who are far greater Star Wars fans than I am — would disagree when I say that Lucasfilm has been creatively bankrupt for years.
Some will venture a Mandalorian here or an Andor there, but those are small-stakes TV series ancillary to a franchise whose credibility as a feature film proposition was forever destroyed the moment the words “somehow Palpatine returned” passed Oscar Isaac’s lips. Since then, we’ve heard little from Star Wars but a series of little-noted and soon forgotten television series found on Disney+. (Again, I am trying to avoid a detailed rant.) Where do you go from there, save into complete hibernation for a decade to let absence make the heart grow fonder? I suppose we’ll inevitably find out. After all, Disney needs to make money.
Cards on the table, I think the Star Wars franchise has been creatively dead since 1983 or thereabouts. I’ve never been terribly in love with it, aside from its utterly pervasive creative iconography. It’s strange how something about which you feel only middlingly can nevertheless occupy so much random space in your mind because of cultural omnipresence. I’ve never even sat all the way through Attack of the Clones — because, good God, think of what else I could be doing during those two and a half hours — but I still know that the guy who tries to sell Obi-Wan “death sticks” (read: cigarettes) in a club scene is named “Elan Sleazebaggano.” (Once you’ve learned something like that, why on earth would you forget it?)
Perhaps you disagree with me and believe that the Star Wars universe has stories left to tell. If you do, you should be praying that Disney chooses a successor to Kathleen Kennedy willing to pull hard astern, against the direction she has steered the brand, less beholden to the woke zeitgeist and more committed to quality. As far as I’m concerned, it would be an unnecessary act of necromancy, but tastes will always differ.