Kathleen Kennedy was a satisfactory producer when working with Spielberg, Lucas and Frank Marshall. She’s never been an artist or a person of vision. After doing everything imaginable to obliterate good will towards the Star Wars franchise, apparently there’s nothing worse left to do and she’s finally decided to move aside. Her successors may do a little better, but it’s too late. Like the white unicorn in The Once and Future King, the magic of Star Wars has been pulled apart and reprocessed into soulless glop so many times that there’s hardly anything recognizable left to mutilate. For my generation, Star Wars was alone at the absolute apex of meaningful, inspiring, exhilarating top-quality art/entertainment, “the Holy Trilogy,” as Kevin Smith put it. Lucas himself began its corruption with his Special Editions of the original films and his own Prequel Trilogy, but selling off the IP to the Disney megacorporation in 2012 sealed its doom. The Disney-Kennedy empire, salivating over their new cash cow, immediately dismissed Lucas and his ideas and green-lit the safest possible reboot of the series, a beat-for-beat remake of the first Star Wars film. It was Kennedy who initiated the custom of hiring gifted young filmmakers to helm each film, and then micromanaging them to the point of insanity, requiring endless, costly reshoots only to end up with lackluster films anyway. It was Kennedy – as brutally roasted by South Park – who forced a superficially feminist agenda into every Star Wars film and TV show, at the expense of literally everything else, leading to the release of even more subpar projects that everyone hated. Kennedy had every right to make stories about innately superior girl bosses all she wants, but she should have created her own new franchise to do so. Latching onto Star Wars like the parasitic face-huggers in Alien, implying that it was a flawed and outmoded property that needed fixing, Kennedy sneered while denying fans anything they might truly appreciate and proceeded to portray Luke Skywalker and Han Solo (and Indiana Jones) as pathetic old losers who needed to be lectured by 20-ish Mary Sues. Kennedy obviously resented playing second-fiddle to Lucas and Spielberg all those years, and instead of creating something of her own, chose to compete by hurling eggs at superior work made by actual artists and visionaries, all while taking cover behind a progressive social agenda that audiences repeatedly rejected and mocked, (including the blink-and-you'll-miss it lesbian kiss in The Rise of Skywalker). Tired of being deliberately insulted over and over again, Star Wars fans have seen through Kennedy's extremely expensive hypocrisy. While she lazily paid lip service to empowerment by wearing “The Force is Female” t-shirts for photographers and shoehorning a simplistic anti-male message into every project, we can’t ignore the fact that in fourteen years she never once hired a female writer or director for any Star Wars film. Like a true spineless, risk-averse corporate hack, behind the scenes she valued proven reliability over social justice and repeatedly brought in J.J. Abrams, Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, Tony Gilroy, Lawrence Kasdan and Ron Howard to get the jobs done, and still second-guessed and sabotaged them anyway. Under Kennedy’s leadership, LucasFilm, a division of the monolithic Disney conglomerate, has shown that it has no respect for Star Wars, no understanding of it, and no intention of doing anything other than relentlessly milking any idea that George Lucas ever dreamed up for every last cent it’s worth. Kennedy presided over the entire era that turned Star Wars into an embarrassing joke, something I never would have imagined was possible thirty years ago.
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