Bulwark Takes - Star Wars Boss Out at Disney! Is There New Hope For LucasFilms?

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Kathleen Kennedy, CEO at LucasFilms and influential figure at Disney, announced she is stepping down. JVL and Sonny Bunch discuss what this means for Disney and the Star Wars franchise going forward.

Hello everyone, this is JVL from the Bulwark here with our culture editor, Sunny Bunch, and we are reacting to news that Kathleen Kennedy is out as the head of Lucasfilm, the Tsar of Star Wars, the Empress of the Galaxy from Far, Far Away. She's not out yet, but she's going to be retiring, word leaked. Sunny, we've never really done a lot of toxic fandom at the Bulwark, but I think that's all about to change right now. Toxic fandom. No, it's so funny because I saw this news break.

I saw this news break in real time, in absolute real time. I got the email from Matt Bellany at Puck. Great newsletter. Everyone should sign up. 100% great newsletter. Everyone should sign up. I got it as I was walking, like literally as I was walking to go to bed. And I almost tweeted it out. I almost tweeted out, Kathleen Kennedy is leaving in the next few months here. That's what he's reported that, you know, three people have told him that she is

in the process of retiring. And I didn't because I did not want to wake up to that in my mentions. I didn't want to be the first person to literally I would have been the first person to tweet about it, I think, except for Melanie. And I didn't want to have to deal with that on on on in my mentions. Can you explain to people what this means in case you are not a Star Wars nerd? Sure. So the thing to remember about Kathleen Kennedy is that she takes over at Lucasfilm after George Lucas sells Lucasfilm to Disney. But before that, she had a very long and successful career as a producer. Like, I think a lot of people, and a lot of the Star Wars nerds in particular, don't really grapple with how successful she was in her career. You know, she's a driving force at Amblin under Steven Spielberg.

You know, she produced Steven Spielberg classics like Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth. E.T., Munich, a bunch of them. Just a bunch of them. A bunch of them. She also produced The Sixth Sense, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seabiscuit. My personal favorite movie that she produced, Congo.

She produced Congo with Frank Marshall directed Congo. Ernie Hudson. Ernie Hudson, Delroy Lindo. Just Joey Pants shows up in an uncredited role great movie, great cast, looks great it's a real feat of producing not necessarily the best movie but the

I want people to understand that she is a successful producer executive producer has a real talent for bringing things together. And, you know, like people will say, oh, well, she was just riding on Spielberg's coattails. She was riding on George Lucas's coattails. Like this isn't, you know, and I don't think that's fair.

None of that's fair. That's just not true. It's you don't you don't have a career in Hollywood like she does without having some some real skill. So she is basically chosen by George Lucas to take over at Lucasfilm under the aegis of Disney. And Disney, for its part, has been pretty hands-off with Star Wars. Now, I mean, obviously there's a lot of overlap. The stuff on Disney+, the Star Wars shows, we'll talk about that. The stuff at the theme parks, which my kids love. My kids love the Galaxy's Edge stuff.

It's all very, very well done. But the world of Star Wars has been treated with real kid's glove by Disney. And that is because I think I again, I think we should not forget that right after the Lucasfilm sale, there were a series of pretty huge wins for Lucasfilm and Disney and Star Wars, right? You got The Force Awakens, which regardless of how you feel about the creative side of that movie is still the highest-grossing domestic film of all time at $953 million. That's how much that movie made just domestically. Seems like a lot. $2.07 billion or something like that worldwide.

But it is the highest-grossing film domestically by $80 million. Now, this isn't adjusted for inflation, whatever. But it remains still the highest-grossing domestic film. Rogue One. Rogue One was an enormous hit. Rogue One was another billion-dollar-grossing movie, and it served also as a proof of concept

that you could do the standalone Star Wars movies, and they could still be big hits, and it looked like Disney between The Force Awakens, Rogue One, movies and they could still be big hits. And it was, it looked like Disney between the force awakens rogue one and the last Jedi, which we'll discuss in a minute. Um, the, the,

it looked like Disney was going to dominate December for the rest of our lives. I think I even wrote something to this, to this effect. You're going to have a star Wars, Disney, January, Disney,

December in theaters, every December for the rest of our lives. this effect. You're going to have a Star Wars Disney movie. Disney December. In theaters every December for the rest of our lives. And then, on top of all that, The Mandalorian kicks off Disney+. It's an enormous hit. This is the way.

Drives tens of millions of subscriptions. This is the way. Drives tens of millions of subscriptions. Like, frankly, the purchase. Merch sales of Baby Yoda. Merch sales through the roof. The most successful new IP character since Spider-Man, maybe. Maybe. I don't know. Hard to say.

Probably not really. But in terms of merchandising, Baby Yoda does not come around every year. Yeah. So anyway, you have to give her credit for those wins. Those are huge wins. Everything else Star Wars and really Lucasfilm related has been an enormous disaster under Disney. Everything has been an enormous disaster under Disney. I like everything has been just a disaster part. And like I mentioned briefly, The Last Jedi. You got to look at what happened with that sequel trilogy.

The problem with the sequel trilogy was that there was nobody at Lucasfilm who could guide this thing in a reasonable way forward to give it a sort of uniform identity. So instead you have JJ Abrams makes a movie, Rian Johnson makes a movie that like throws out 80% of the stuff JJ Abrams did. JJ Abrams comes back after Colin Trevorrow gets fired from the, the rise of Skywalker or whatever they were going to call that. Uh, and JJ Abrams was like, no, Rian Johnson, I'm putting all of those things back in and we're doing more stuff that you didn't want to do and there was nobody in charge there was nobody in charge and that is a failure of leadership that's a failure of leadership it's worse than nobody's in charge sonny you're you're you're downplaying it the problem is that there was no plan yes it is it is stunning to me to make a trilogy without having

any idea where your trilogy is going you don't have to be wedded to your concept but you have to have a concept right i mean somewhere there has to be a sketch for this is what this is the story that this three movie pack is going to tell. And these are roughly going to be the beats. And these are roughly going to be the arcs. And instead, they seem to have been made one at a time. Well, I guess you don't know everything about women yet. Well, they were.

But I mean like, and conceived of one at a time. Well, they were. They were all. But I mean like. Well, they were. And conceived of one at a time. They were all made in tension with each other. Again, I cannot stress enough. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen. I cannot stress enough how much The Last Jedi feels like a direct repudiation of so much of The Force Awakens. Right down to like in the opening moments

smashing kylo ren's mask which like i don't know if you remember any of the pre the pre stuff that came out before the force awakens but there were like these loving mini featurettes where jj abrams was like we spent hours we spent months working on this mask and we wanted to get it to look just right and then in the opening moments uh it just smashed just smashed right to bit there's an entire thing in in force awakens where they with maz kanata where ray finds the lightsaber it's this big moment like well okay this is really important this is an important artifact she's been it's a whole plot thing and ryan johnson literally has luke skywalker throw the lightsaber away over his shoulder like a piece of junk.

So let's not dwell on that. Let's not dwell on those. Let's dwell on the other messes. Like, for instance, Solo. Solo was another one of these standalone Star Wars movies like Rogue One. It was a Star Wars story. Was that a Lord and Miller story first? So it was Lord and Miller shot a lot of that movie, is my understanding. Christopher

Lord and Phil Miller. Or did I get that right? Whatever. Lord and Miller shot a bunch of that. And they got fired. They got fired and they got replaced by Ron Howard and Ron Howard came in. Ron Howard, great director. I love the guy. He was put

in a bad situation and delivered a mediocre product. It's not terrible. Solo's not terrible. It's not the worst movie I've the guy. He was put in a bad situation and delivered a mediocre product. It's not terrible. Solo's not terrible. It's not the worst movie I've ever seen. But it's pretty mid. It's pretty mid. And it's not good.

And people didn't like it. And it came right on the heels of The Last Jedi, which was a very controversial movie. I don't know if you remember, J.B., a lot of controversy about that movie. And everything from there just went off the rails. There were a whole bunch of movies that got... I'm not going to list all of the movies that were announced and got killed, but you had the Patty Jenkins X-Wing movie. There was a Guillermo del Toro Jabba the Hutt movie.

There was a Taika Waititi trilogy of movies, I think. There was a Donald Glover Lando movie that was like the story about this is so like Donald Glover is attached to this Lando movie. And my understanding is that nobody talked to Donald Glover about this beforehand. And so the whole the whole thing is just a just a mess. It's just a mess. This is an executive mess, right? When you when you were executive mess. mess. It's just a mess. This is an executive mess, right? It's an executive mess.

Yes. That's the problem. And this is why this is the toxic fandom. These are problems of executive leadership. And I kind of can't believe that Disney left Kathleen Kennedy in place for as long as they did but i think that she gets the worst of all worlds that there is a toxic fandom which attacks kathleen kennedy in ways that are like bizarre and personal and then there is another toxic fandom which defends her no matter what and so would have made it painful for disney to fire No, no. Disney basically decided we just have to wait for her to leave on her own.

Totally. That's 100% what happened. And I'm glad you said this, JBL, because look, there are undoubtedly bad sexist fans who were very mean to her. Absolutely. That is a real thing. Grant all that. That exists in every fandom everywhere. That's always going to happen. The problem was every single criticism of her,

every single suggestion that things were going wrong under her watch at the leadership level was met with, well, we can't give in to the bad fans. We can't give in to the bad fans. We can't give them what they want. We can't let the terrorists win. And, like, that's no way to run a company. Like, I'm sorry. You can't just say, like, that's no way to run a company. Like, I'm sorry.

You can't just say, like, well, we have to leave her there because otherwise the bad guys win. It's a mess. But that's what happened. That's what happened. And she's on the way out. And what's weird is that, again, this isn't like – so Lucasfilm is a studio within a studio. But it's not just a studio, right? A studio can make a bunch of movies that do poorly and then make a bunch of movies that do well later. But IP doesn't really work that way.

No. Intellectual property needs to be protected and nurtured and shielded because once IP gets damaged, it becomes less valuable. Right. And this was the danger of trying to wait her out is what if she was just so bad that the Star Wars IP became less's a direct comparison within the Disney house that could be made about this, which is how Marvel was handled, how all the MCU stuff was handled. Everybody looked at the Marvel Cinematic Universe and said, this is how you did. They're doing it right over here. They're doing standalone movies and they're all interconnected and they're all hugely successful. And we're where everybody's happy.

We're everybody's happy here. And now that whole thing has kind of gone off the rails. I think an under appreciated aspect of why all of this has gone off the rails is Disney plus, but that's a conversation for another time. That's a, that's a whole separate can of worms. Uh, and we can get into that some other day, but the, but the, uh, the problem with Star Wars and with Lucasfilm, and frankly, it's not just Star Wars, right? Lucasfilm is also where

the Indiana Jones IP lives, right? So Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is not a good movie. That's a bad movie. It's not a good movie. It's misconceived on virtually every level. Virtually every level it's wrong. And, you know, it's competently made because James Mangold is a competent director, but it's not a good movie.

And it is really jarring to compare, to watch. It's very jarring to watch Dial of Destiny and even Kingdom of the Crystal Skull back to back. Because Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for all of its problems, is still a Steven Spielberg movie. And Steven Spielberg is a transcendent director who, like, understands how camera moves work. Who understands the fluidity of motion in pictures better than literally anybody else. James Mangold, for as good as he is, is not that. And so you watch that movie, which again, it's not a good Indiana Jones movie, but it is identifiably an Indiana Jones movie.

And you watch Dial of Destiny and you're just like, what are they doing over there? Like, why is this happening? I want to mount a, not a defense of Kathleen Kennedy, but a possible explanation. And I want you to react to it for me. There is a cult of Bob Iger, Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, which says he's a genius and look how well Disney did and he bought all this IP. But the little known secret of Bob Iger's career is that he's like the Homer Simpson character when he goes to take over the Globotech or whatever it's called. You know, that thing you're doing, can you do more of it? Sure, boss. Do more then.

That's what Iger does. This thing who wants to be a millionaire gets good net ratings as a special event. Let's just do it every day. And he winds up killing things because of that, right? He killed who wants to be a millionaire. And he finally killed Marvel. As genius as Kevin Feige is, Marvel is in a lot of trouble because Bob Iger just kept saying, do more, do more, do more. And so you have just, you know, Marvel.

I don't think it's just superhero fatigue, although that's part of it. But if that exists, then Marvel created it. And maybe that was part of what happened to Kathleen Kennedy, that she was living under. I mean, people forget she was the head of Lucasfilm, but she had to live under Bob Iger, who was saying, I need X number of Star Wars streaming products for Disney Plus per annum. And so that's why you got a bunch of really bad Star Wars streaming products. Yeah. I mean, again, I do think the...

Iger broke Marvel. So why isn't it possible that he also broke Lucasfilm and Kathleen Kennedy? Right. I think it is underappreciated the extent to which Disney Plus is really messing up both of these properties. And, again, this is a whole separate video. But, like, the fact that we haven't had... By the time The Mandalorian and Grogu comes out, which is a movie that is based on a Disney Plus show, by the time that hits theaters in May of 2026, it'll have been seven years, well, six and a half years,

since the last Star Wars movie has been in theaters. So I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's too much crap on Disney Plus. There's a lot of stuff that's not great. You know, Andor aside, people really love Andor. I thought Andor was fine, but, like, Andor, let's grant that Andor was very good, and the first couple seasons of The Mandalorian were very good. There's so much bad stuff out there.

That doesn't excuse the fact that the movie product has disappeared entirely. I mean, like, the complete absence... And look, there have frequently been long lacunas between Star Wars series, right? You go from Return of the Jedi to The Phantom Menace is, what, 16 years, something like that? Between Revenge of the Sith and the force awakens was another

what 10 years whatever i mean it like there there are gaps like this but the promise the promise of bringing lucasfilm under the the disney label was we're gonna do a move we're gonna do a movie a year we're doing we're doing this it's where there's gonna be it's gonna be there all the time and instead of doing that they shifted to're going to do a TV series every six months. And the returns on that have been very diminishing. It's really – it's not a great state of affairs. I will say, though, again, it's working out on the parks level, and that's an enormous and under-discussed part of the Disney business. The economics work in a certain way, right? The economics

of this, if you go to Disneyland or you go to Disney World and you go to the Galaxy's Edge place, it's always packed. The lines for Rise of the Resistance are always two hours. There are the most expensive rides in the parks to get on if you want to skip the line.

It is still a valuable property. I think it is still there to be saved. I think it is probably good to get fresh blood in at the top, though the fresh blood, I would assume, is going to be Filoni and Favreau, the guys who have been running the Star Wars stuff on Disney+. Yeah. So I don't know if that really counts.

Yeah. This is, for me, the duality of Kathleen Kennedy, is that she made the highest-grossing Star Wars movie ever and the best Star Wars movie ever, I think, which is Rogue One. I think Rogue One is... I'm not willing to say that it's better than A New Hope and Empire, but it's like 1A, 1B, and 1C.

I just rewatched it last week. It is in the conversation. And that is the first movie since A New Hope where you care about like seven different characters. As the movie's going, you really, you're like, oh, I like this character. What's going to happen to her? What's going to happen to him?

That blind guy, that blind monk, he's great. I love him. No, don't let him die. Right? And she also made what I think are the two worst Star Wars movies, which are The Rise of Skywalker and what was the Rian Johnson middle one, Last Jedi? The Last Jedi, yeah.

Those movies are terrible. And I say that, I don't want to spoil, you and I are going to have another conversation this week. In the last week, I also re-watched Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, which are bad movies. They're both better than The Last Jedi and Rian Johnson and Skywalker. We can have it out over Revenge of the Sith. That's how bad.

That's how bad. Attack of the Clones is the worst Star Wars movie. I hate everything about that movie from how it looks to... Well, I don't know. This is how much... Look, I've never

revisited Rise of Skywalker. I have no intention of ever revisiting Rise of Skywalker. I don't know. Before you say Rise of Skywalker. So, like, I don't know. Before you say Attack of the Clones is worse, you'll have to go and see Rise of Skywalker. I'm telling you. I can't do that.

I just did these things. I can't. I would rather. But here's the thing. I would rather watch Attack of the Clones again. I don't know. We're getting off the rails. We're getting off the rails.

All right. Final question. Final question. Why is Disney and Lucasfilm so intent on making Grogu happen instead of just Baby Yoda? You can't call him Baby Yoda. This is one of the most insane branding things I've ever seen. Yoda is not a species name. You have this thing which is sensational, and everybody calls it Baby Yoda, and they first become obsessed.

No, it's the child. It's the child. It's not Baby Yoda and now, well, it's Grogu. Because Yoda is not, you can't just call him Baby Yoda. Stop trying to make fetch happen, Disney. He's not Yoda as a baby. It's not, it's not, it would be one thing if Yoda

was the name of the race, right? Then it could be like Baby Yoda. He's a Baby Yoda. But he's not. That's a separate character. That's a separate character. Why does that matter? They don't actually have laser swords. Laser swords don't exist either. These things don't have to make sense.

You just roll with it. He's Baby Yoda. All right. I mean, look, I call him Baby Yoda.