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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.
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."
Most people are only seeing that message because they're not reading the second level meaning.
Star wars isn't particularly woke. The problem is that they, and Disney more broadley, continuously try to reskin movies and franchises. Literal reskinning, like The Little Mermaid. But also reskinning entire movies to appeal to demographics they didn't previously appeal to.
This pisses off people who liked the previous movie, and generally doesn't do well at attracting new fans. Because the source material is nearly always better than the next generation of content. Nobody is reskinning box office flops from the 80s.
So the business model is to take a massive box office hit or mass cultural impact, e.g. star wars (LoTR, Star Trek), pivot away from the target demographic, make a worse movie that appeals to different people, and then wait and see what happens.
This results in mostly misses. The aim is to be more inclusive, but the reskinning process is invariably decreasing their appeal to ~25% of the population (white men) to appeal to 6% of the population (black women). Unsurprisingly, most black women didn't grow up loving star wars, so the heightened interest in reigniting an old IP is totally wasted.
Again, this isn't particularly woke. Making a movie for a black demographic is literally uncontroversial. What's controversial is deliberately taking away that movie from a white demographic.
The obvious solution is to make more disney movies that appeal to blacks or asians. Not to reskin ones that don't appeal to them. If there is an IP that appeals to white men, you probably don't need to consider it literal fascism, and can just make it for them.
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