Kathleen Kennedy is reportedly stepping away from Lucasfilm at the end of the year. While the news isn’t official, multiple industry trades have confirmed the story after it was broken by Puck News’ Matt Belloni earlier today, with Variety noting that she is planning to fully retire when her contract concludes at the end of 2025. If so, it will mark the conclusion of an extraordinary career that earned a place in film history larger than the admittedly checkered previous decade of Disney-produced Star Wars films, television series, and other assorted media.
It also feels prudent to make this point about Kennedy’s larger legacy given the schadenfreude that’s already seeped throughout the bro-sphere and its tendrils of rage-baiting influencers on YouTube and TikTok. To be sure, Kennedy’s tenure as the head of Lucasfilm has coincided with the oversaturation of the Star Wars “universe,” a concept that once was synonymous with mystique and the pinnacle of Hollywood escapist cinema. Nowadays, its connotations land closer to exhaustion with a steady diet of mediocre and disposable Disney+ television series, plus a spigot of films that was abruptly turned off in 2019 following the lousy conclusion to “the Skywalker Saga,” Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Yet we would argue Kennedy (willingly) entered into a nigh unwinnable scenario when she became the first head of Lucasfilm not named George Lucas in 2012. Around the same time, she got orders from then and future Disney CEO Bob Iger that they wanted a new Star Wars movie released every year beginning in 2015, ideally forever. Then came the demands of Iger and his brief successor, Bob Chapek, to also have constant Star Wars content on their sparkly new streaming service, Disney+—a shortsighted corporate strategy that even felled the far more well-organized and structured Marvel Studios factory as much as it has Lucasfilm.
But even within that corporate structure determined to milk intellectual property dry of money—and novelty—Kennedy still was able to successfully relaunch Star Wars for a new generation of young audiences in the generally well-regarded Star Wars: The Force Awakens and produce what many argue is the first great Star Wars film made since 1983, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Admittedly, Last Jedi also has as many (and much louder) online detractors, which speaks to the controversy of Kennedy’s tenure in Star Wars Land.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that the mass-politicization of online fandom in general in a post-Twitter, post-Joe Rogan world has been trending in the direction of performative outrage for years—-i.e. it is perhaps inevitable these days that Marvel fans who grew up loving Anthony Mackie in Captain America: The Winter Soldier 11 years ago are now helping shape opinions with 45 minutes about him starring in Brave New World is outrageous, actually.
Kennedy walked into this arena with eyes wide open to run a factory in an era where “franchises” were not meant to be nurtured and protected, but exploited and strip-mined. Still, even within those confines, she produced a few good Star Wars movies and at least one terrific television series in Andor, which took more risks with its IP than almost anything else being produced under the Marvel umbrella, or among competitors who have similarly tried to make superhero movies or Lord of the Rings shared universe expansions.
And, again, Kennedy has enjoyed a remarkable career well before that contentious galaxy far, far away.
A California lifer, Kennedy wasn’t even 25 when she got her foot in the door as an assistant for John Milius, the director of films like The Wind and the Lion (1975), the guy who thought of giving Quint that iconic speech in Jaws, and also the executive producer of Steven Spielberg’s 1941. That epic comedy would be one of Spielberg’s few missteps, but on the production he noticed Kennedy’s ability to pitch great ideas despite nominally being a secretary. He quickly would make her his associate on Raiders of the Lost Ark. By the time the sequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came around three years later, she was a junior producer on the movie.
In the interim, she helped co-found Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment, which led to her executive producing 1980s favorites like The Goonies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the Back to the Future trilogy. She also would become one of Spielberg’s most trusted personal producers on films that include Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, and Munich. She likewise worked outside of Spielberg’s orbit in the 1990s and 2000s as a producer on films that run the gamut from Twister and The Sixth Sense to Seabiscuit and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
The reason Kennedy got the Lucasfilm gig after the Disney purchase is she had a history of coming up in the same Hollywood where filmmakers like Lucas and Spielberg made those cultural touchstones Disney so eagerly builds on. She was there at the laying of the foundations in the case of producing two-thirds of the original Indiana Jones flicks. She earned her place in film history for being a smart, resourceful filmmaker who contributed to movies that weren’t only commercially viable, but in many instances built to last as classics through the decades that followed.
That uncanny skill set got her the Lucasfilm position, but the modern age of commercial, blockbuster filmmaking is less about creating new classics as it is managing old ones for maximum leverage. Instead of innovation, it is more a job built around resuscitation. Kennedy’s success at the latter is uneven, but as Marvel Studios’ current troubles suggest, eventually everyone runs into the problem of diminishing returns.
What won’t diminish are the truly great movies that Kennedy had her hand in.
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