Kathleen Kennedy Is Everything Americans Loathe About Their Elites
How to fail upwards, forever, through sheer social power
She was horrible at taking notes... but what she did know how to do was interrupt somebody in midsentence. We'd be pitching ideas back and forth, and Kathy — who was supposed to be writing these ideas down — suddenly put her pencil down and would say something like, “And what if he didn't get the girl, but instead he got the dog?” — Steven Spielberg on Kathleen Kennedy in a 2015 interview
She is a woman. She is named Kennedy. These two immutable characteristics are joined in marriage with Frank Marshall, Spielberg’s co-founder of Amblin Entertainment. Kathleen Kennedy is Hollywood royalty by pedigree rather than merit. She became the president of Lucasfilm in 2012, when Disney purchased the company, and her tenure has been a notable failure.
Kennedy has overseen the demise of three George Lucas franchises: the much-anticipated sequel to the classic Willow was such a disaster that Disney removed it from streaming services and took a tax write-off. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was supposed to replace Harrison Ford with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who would wear the hat and take over the franchise. Hurried reshoots in the wake of test audience rebellion and intense social media scrutiny produced a confused, awkward mess that barely covered production expenses and certainly did not cover promotional expenses.
And then there is Star Wars. An unconfirmed rumor this week says that Disney has been trying to sell Star Wars, or potentially Lucasfilm as a whole, for as long as seven months — with no buyers. Kathleen Kennedy’s name shall live in infamy, long after her death, for the cruel assassination of what used to be the world’s biggest science fiction brand.
Her flying media monkeys attacked the fandom at every turn: anyone who didn’t like or enjoy the new Star Wars was racist, misogynist, a bigot. Kennedy destroyed the career of Gina Carano, hugely popular co-star of The Mandalorian, over an anodyne, politically centrist tweet. Politics were the entire point of the new Star Wars under Kennedy. The force was now female, per the Nike campaign shirt that Kennedy wore to a 2015 showing of The Force Awakens. Audiences have declined ever since.
More than any other factor, Kennedy’s insertion of feminism into what had historically been a ‘boy brand’ is responsible for the decline of the franchise. The story that she told Disney is that because 40 percent of the Star Wars audience was female, having women lead the franchise would increase its audience. In fact, women enjoy seeing masculine men on screen. They enjoy seeing the man get the woman instead of the dog.
In Kennedy’s Star Wars, the man gets the dog, or rather the droid. Audiences are staying away in droves.
Heterosexual romance has consistently been depicted in the Kennedy era as a dangerous fusion of good and evil rather than boy-gets-girl. Practically the only Star Wars fandom that Kennedy catered to, on the other hand, was the ‘shippers,’ as Finn and Poe, the characters played by John Boyega and Oscar Isaac respectively, were floated as a gay match after 2019’s Rise of Skywalker.
Luke Skywalker became a shade of his former self, a self-pitying mess. Han Solo returned to the screen just long enough to die. Solo, which appeared four years after its titular character’s pathetic onscreen demise, was the first Star Wars film to ever lose money.
As the franchise expanded on Disney+ streaming, the quality of the visual and narrative storytelling declined even as production costs remained exhorbitant. Obi-Wan Kenobi lasted one season in 2022. The show reduced its male lead to a tortured, gutless failure, inserting a precocious young Leia Organa to steal scenes.
In 2023, Ahsoka featured a girlboss and her girlboss friends in a world of evil or ineffectual men. Sabine Wren, played by Australian actress Natasha Liu Bordizzo, became the first character in the history of the franchise to survive being stabbed with a lightsaber. Viewership declined over the run of series.
These issues came to a head with The Acolyte, directed by Leslye Headland, in 2024. Headland, a lesbian, produced the story of a band of lesbian space witches that have used the force to create twin daughters without a man in sight. A team of jedi arrive to interview the girls. Defying basic logic, character actions do not match their stated motivations. In a series of reversals rather than twists, the resistance of the space witches leads to their accidental demise when their stone cave complex … catches fire? What?
Elsewhere in the series, flames rise from a damaged spaceship into the vacuum of outer space. A franchise set in outer space forgot how outer space works. What little audience remained for Star Wars on Disney+ evaporated after episode 3. The Acolyte performed so badly that media watchers wonder if it has not spoiled any chance for the second season of Andor, a Star Wars show that was more critically acclaimed than watched.
To pile insult onto injury, Kennedy has systematically soft-announced numerous Star Wars projects that have never reached production, diluting any remaining fan enthusiasm. Those vaporware projects were a strategy to maintain Kennedy’s public relations relevance as her stock fell with Disney. Even now, she is holding out for one last, big hit, something to call her own, before she finally hands over Lucasfilm. She does not have it in her, however. Kathleen Kennedy cannot produce a hit to save her life.
Rumors had therefore swirled for years that Kennedy was on her way out, that some sort of stage-managed succession was happening at a glacial pace. Last Monday, Puck co-founder Matthew Belloni announced that it was finally happening, though the process may take all year. There was cautious rejoicing in pop culture circles.
Three days later, Deadline editor-in-chief Mike Fleming, Jr. decried “the appetite for schadenfreude” and “pseudo-drama” surrounding the story in his Kathleen Kennedy puff piece. Kennedy “has done much with the challenge of trying to broaden George Lucas’ Star Wars vision,” Fleming wrote shamelessly. She “has been working on a succession plan for a couple years, eyeing candidates from within in process with Bob Iger and Alan Bergman.” So: story confirmed. Emphases added:
What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob and Alan about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing the Mandalorian movie right now, and I’m also producing Shawn Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it.
“I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies,” Kennedy insists, not actually saying she will always make Star Wars movies. But also: “We’ll probably make an announcement months or a year out, and I have every intention of sticking around to help that person be successful.” Story confirmed. Kennedy “deserves to own her own narrative,” Fleming writes. This is all about the ego of Kathleen Kennedy, her embarrassing lack of success, and the embarrassment of having her exit revealed in advance.
According to Kennedy, all that money lost on streaming shows that audiences hated is the secret to keeping George Lucas’s vision alive with the next generation. According to Kennedy, the Mandalorian movie will be a huge hit despite the audience leaving in Season 3. According to Kennedy, “we gave the young audience an opportunity to enter Star Wars at a different place and not feel like you have to have seen everything. It can become their Star Wars. And that, I think is, is the fun storytelling challenge.”
In Season 3 of Mandalorian, the main character played by Pedro Pascal takes a back seat to strong female leadership. It is worth noting that Baby Yoda was at first a huge success with Star Wars fans and collectors. By the end of Season 3, however, sales of Baby Yoda toys had collapsed. In fact, sales of all Star Wars merchandise have collapsed. Hasbro insists that they are not giving up on the brand that made them rich for decades, but the reader may visit any Ollie’s store and see the piles of discount Star Wars merchandise for themselves.
This has happened before. In 1983, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was all the rage with my peer group. Surprised by how many girls liked the show and the toys, in 1984 the producers introduced She-Ra, a female equal to He-Man, in a bid to grow the female audience. By the time the TV show went off the air in 1985, everyone was already over He-Man, and my local TG&Y could not give the She-Ra toys away, indeed they could not give any He-Man toys away. Feminizing boy brands is the perfect way to destroy them. Just ask Bud Light.
What Kathleen Kennedy claims to have accomplished at Lucasfilm is a generational transfer of the Star Wars brand to the so-called “modern audience” that supposedly demands stories in which the man gets the dog, or else a gay love affair, or else killed, while the girlboss does everything, taking no moral responsibility for anything, deserving what she receives simply because she was born awesome. Audiences have had enough of it.
Asked what was the biggest challenge to running Lucasfilm into the ground, Kennedy wanted “to analyze and understand what was inspiring George when he created Star Wars, when he was still looking at Saturday matinees and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and those are things of the past and politically what he was reflecting in his stories.” Entertainment made in the era of rising totalitarianism justifies her insertion of politics into the present-day Star Wars, which “has always had a kind of world building, and it reflects a certain amount of our society.”
Except that Lucas made Star Wars for general audiences, meaning his story appealed to wider society, while Kathleen Kennedy has remade Star Wars in the image of her own, rarefied elite society. She is not, has never been, an average American. She was never in an executive position before Lucasfilm. What skills she has as a producer have been nullified by her choices for the director’s chair. Kennedy kept her name in her marriage because it was her primary source of social power, her one qualification to be in the room while better creators talked amongst themselves. The creators she has given reign have generally underwhelmed viewers.
Americans have given their verdict on Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars: they hate it. Her cultural vandalism has reduced the brand to a joke. The audience no longer cares. They have tuned out. Mandalorian will not, cannot rescue Kennedy’s reputation. A similar effect has occurred across Hollywood: despite ditching Jimmy Kimmel for the less-political Conan O’Brien, this week’s Academy Awards was the third least-watched in history. It seems that nothing can arrest the decline of out cultural elites, for they insist on giving awards to movies that nobody watches, that nobody asked for.
Americans want entertainment that escapes the present-day for a galaxy far, far away, not… this. Kathleen Kennedy has become a figure of resentment on her own terms, with her own narratives of entitled women. Her career of failure tracks with the overall decline of both Disney and Hollywood as the Spielberg-Lucas generation of filmmakers aged out. An honest cultural history of the Kennedy era will not be kind. If Mandalorian and Grogu is a dog, she gets to own it forever.
