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So it is official. After nearly 14 years as President of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy has stepped down. Nope, not bait this time. Dave Filoni is taking over.
In the Deadline interview, KK reiterates that she wouldn't change anything:
But does anybody care anymore? This isn't even a twinkle in culture war discourse, KiA's response was total indifference. Despite Iger's comments a few years ago saying that "creators at Disney should entertain first, message second", I haven't seen them walk the walk. Within Star Wars itself, what immediately followed those statements was the wokest Star Wars to date, which got cancelled just one month after the finale aired due to low viewership.
While everyone was memeing about where the bodies were buried, how does anybody even expect to fix the IP at this point? Every year since Rise of Skywalker, they've been dropping a new season of a new live action show like candies. Star Wars ceased to be an "event" anymore. Sequel merchandise don't sell as well as the classics. But does it mean Star Wars is dead in the water? Probably not, Andor season 2 debuted with record viewership numbers. I guess, Star Wars fans are still more forgiving than most people think! Even if the IP may not be as bulletproof as it was during the Clone Wars era. I don't see the "Force is Female" direction being reversed for sure.
Disney could easily have used the well-received parts of legends to make prestige TV. That would have been the logical thing to do in the 2010's, and it's what I expected them to do when they bought Lucasfilm at the peak of Game of Thrones. You could quietly drop the slop, which you've already identified, and make GoT level money off of Thrawn. They chose not to do this because they wanted a 'fresh fan base', I guess, but it's literally Star Wars. It's popular enough that you can assume anyone who doesn't like it already isn't going to like anything bearing a passing resemblance to it.
They passed up the safe bet and gored the franchise. Oh well. Kinda sucks for them that they gambled and lost.
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The Disney live action projects have been:
Movies
Series
Of ten projects, we have five projects that are bad, two that are at least okay, two that are good, and one that is great. Not an amazing hit rate, and the ST being bad is a massively outsized issue, but probably not as bad as one might think if you compare it against the industry as a whole.
I think if you look at why the bad stuff is bad, it's hard to pull together a coherent throughline other than "get good." The ST and BoBF both flounder not because of particular tone or themes, but because they seemingly had no plan or idea for what they really wanted to do beyond cash in on Star Wars. The Acolyte has a serviceable concept for a movie, but it's drawn out over 5.5 hours (and has piss-poor execution to boot). Kenobi had a clear enough plan, but shabby execution and was something nobody wanted (or rather, getting what you wanted in the most literal sense, but in a way that makes you wish you hadn't asked for it). Similarly, Ahsoka embodies how pandering to existing fans is liable to produce a self-indulgent mess (though FWIW most SW fans I know IRL like Ahsoka, which is proof they have no taste).
Of these live action projects, the only ones that code as particularly woke are TLJ (which was bad) and Andor (which was not). The impression I've gotten from reading about the behind-the-scenes of SW production was not that Kennedy was pushing really hard for a particular vision that no one liked but that she was pretty lackadaisical and didn't impose much discipline on her productions or have a great sense for quality.
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Giving that this is CW, it is probably about Star Wars being too woke?
I find this a bit of a strange objection. "Oh, I am fine with Disney pimping out the rotting corpse of a once beloved, childhood-defining franchise for as long as there is anyone still wanting to pay for it, but I draw the line at politics I disagree with."
Art isn't like people, it doesn't have a fixed expiry date of seven-score years and ten. The difference between rejuvenation and 'using the rotten corpse as a finger-puppet' is whether it holds true to the original spirit and people still like it. Politics is very relevant to that.
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Yes. The Mandalorian movie is going to do jack shit at the box office and that will pretty much be the deathblow as far as Disney is concerned. I'll bet they know it, too. If they thought it was going to do a billion dollars or something Kennedy would have hung around for another few months and retired on a win.
Speaking of which, there's a Star Wars movie coming out in a few months and nobody gives a shit. I haven't heard a peep about it anywhere else.
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So it's really happening at long, long last?
I imagine because they've tanked Star Wars as a property so comprehensively, there isn't even enough of the bones left to squeeze anything more out of, so Kennedy can be cut loose. Nobody is going to bat for her and she can't promise one more big, sure thing to grab viewing figures.
Star Trek is going the same way, with the latest disaster. This Guardian review is something else; "Grange Hill but with phasers" is not immediately enticing. I'm burned out on Trek. You can't keep insulting legacy fans for being legacy fans and not supporting New Thing when you aren't grabbing replacement new fans in sufficient numbers. Same with Doctor Who as well, seems like. The First Big Black Gay Woke Doctor was, somehow or other, bafflingly, not a huge ratings success. What unfathomable reason could possibly explain all this?
Miniscule. Tiny. Too negligible to even bother counting. If they all disappeared, we wouldn't even notice, that's how unimportant they are. Wait, why are our ratings tanking and nobody is purchasing our merch?
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If you actually run the numbers to get around the “minutes watched” dodge, it’s about 4.8 million viewers. That’s not abysmal but it’s definitely not great either.
Star Wars was never my fandom, so I haven't watched any of the movies since "The Phantom Menace" (and that was primarily for Liam Neeson), and none of the TV spinoffs.
But I've seen reasonably good things about "Andor". Can they possibly manage to pull the rabbit out of the hat with "don't fuff this up, and try writing something decent" or is all hope lost, like the Lesbian Space Witches Am-Dram Choir And Interpretive Dance Troupe?
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The king is dead, long live the king.
If you were turned off by The Force Awakens (which, contrary to what Kennedy says, was disliked for being too much like the OT), it's been a decade. If Last Jedi killed your fandom it's been 8 years. I don't know how you can sustain constant hope and disappointment with an IP this long. I tapped out mentally in-theatre with TLJ. Every time I wanted to jump back in because they seem to have figured it out (e.g. when the reviews for Mandalorian were good) they quickly reverted to form.
Whoever is still with it is the new audience and they've made their peace with Kennedy or like her content. The mega-haters who were praying on Kennedy's downfall have to have tapped out. I skimmed the channels of some of the usual suspects and the comments are basically fatalist. In part because they seem to hate Filoni too for some reason, but also because the game of wishing her gone has gone on too long to be amusing.
Look at what you just said: Star Wars ushered in the blockbuster era! Even the Prequels maintained a $650 million floor. And we're all coping that one TV show out of all the material produced did well on TV.
The prequels killed any interest I had in the IP (in hindsight, viewing it as an adult rather than a kid, Return of the Jedi was also bad). Specifically the second one since I had hopes the first awful one was a fluke. Nope, just garbage. So I guess I'm coming up on 24 years of not seeing why people still get invested in it.
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Honestly? I've never really had a soft spot for female action heroes. I say this being a comic book nerd who did actually enjoy Storm, Wanda and Barbara Gordon's arcs in Lifedeath, House of M and Oracle: Year One respectively. But female power was not something I found "fascinating", it certainly hasn't been a novelty for as long as I've lived. It always felt like artificially imposed social pressure rather than organic interest. Also never liked the idea - long before it became an industry mandate - of established male led action franchises handing over the symbolic and narrative center to a female successor either, well before that became an industry mandate. I noped out of TFA once that bait and switch happened, way before TLJ (in)famously dialled it up to 11. Now we can certainly argue which trilogy probably handled narrative execution, pacing, directorial vision, dialogue beats, subplots and cinematography better than the other.
But none of these "safe critiques" address the foundational rewrite at the heart of the Sequels, that Star Wars was a boys' IP. Boys loved it because it centred on what boys disproportionately enjoy: spacefaring civilisation, starcrafts, galactic battles, trench runs, lightsaber combats, training hierarchies, rivalry, sacrifice, and a classical male hero growing into responsibility and status. The Original Trilogy understood what young boys (their prime audience) aspired to be, that is why it is so timeless. Over a decade into the culture shift that's thoroughly penalised every instance of male heroism and ambition as "moral crimes" to be corrected, I think it's totally fair to just sit back, crack a beer and say, "I'm tired, boss".
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Surely, The Mandalorian also counts as a success. It was possibly more popular and influential than Andor, if not as critically acclaimed.
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Filoni is a creatively middling hack, he only looks good because he’s been standing next to Kennedy for the last ten years, and at least he doesn’t despise the source material he’s working with.
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My best guess is that before long, advances with AI will allow people to create decent sci-fi / action films without major studios and 9-figure budgets. At that point, people will (1) develop Star Wars fan fiction, some of which is very good and non-woke; and (2) develop science fiction based on new, some of which is very good and non-woke. Just continuing the trend of popular culture fracturing.
Nine figures gotta come from somewhere. You got a million bucks lying around to throw into a project that cribs the intellectual property of the most litigious company on earth?
No, but what happens when such a movie can be created by one person with $200 worth of software?
Anyway, just right now I did a quick search and found various Star Wars fan films on YouTube.
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Well that is some cope, and I'm guilty of huffing it myself. Yup, that's also the most assured way to get faithful adaptations to your favourite novels! As a bonus, you also get to kneecap a multibillion dollar empire in the process, and AI, the apparent bane of all human workers, will be the sole culprit. A very delicious thought for sure.
I've never experienced sympathetic Bulverism before, so thank you for that.
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When I see "Andor", I always think of the Wheel of Time before I think, "oh, that's a Star Wars name too."
It also is present in Star Trek.
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