Kathleen Kennedy Is Everything Americans Loathe About Their Elites

How to fail upwards, forever, through sheer social power

Grok AI image of Kathleen Kennedy laughing while Lucasfilm burns

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.