Entertainment
Kathleen Kennedy Finally Figured Out How To Stop Ruining Star Wars
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The biggest villain in Star Wars isn’t Darth Vader or Kylo Ren. No, if you ask most fans disappointed by the Disney era of the franchise, they’ll say the biggest foe of this galaxy far, far away is Kathleen Kennedy. She’s the president of Lucasfilm, and she oversaw debacles like the Sequel Trilogy, the cancellation of exciting films like Rogue Squadron, and the firing of creative directors like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
However, Starfighter director Shawn Levy has revealed that Kennedy finally learned how to make a good Star Wars movie: by encouraging him to make whatever kind of film he wants rather than worrying about how it will affect the franchise’s tangled mythology.
Forget The Sequels And Prequels
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Levy revealed that he was one of many directors who expressed interest in making a Star Wars movie way back in 2012. A decade later, Kennedy called and asked him to make a film in the franchise, causing the director to ask questions like “what’s it a prequel to?” and “what’s it a sequel to?” The Lucasfilm president responded, “whatever one you want,” encouraging Levy to simply “make it feel like your movies feel.”
Cynically, this may just be a bit of good, old-fashioned PR, with the director of the upcoming Star Wars movie publicly praising the executive who gave him the opportunity. However, rebellions are built on hope, and I can’t help but hope that Shawn Levy is being completely truthful about this exchange with the Lucasfilm president. If it is true, it means that the impossible has happened, and Kennedy has learned that the secret to making a good Star Wars movie is to let directors unleash their inner creativity instead of trying to micromanage the film via committee.
Star Wars Goes Down Disney’s Dark Path
While Kennedy oversaw many problems with the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (and we’ll definitely be circling back to those remarkably uneven films), I think the primary problem with the Disney era of Star Wars films can be traced back to Solo: A Star Wars Story. Originally, that film was being directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, a director duo famous for their hilariously weird sense of humor. But when they tried to make Solo too funny, Disney gave them the boot and brought in Ron Howard as director to make the safest possible version of a Han Solo origin story.
To me, this was direct evidence of something that would become a major problem with Star Wars under Kathleen Kennedy’s supervision: the creative vision of directors would get constantly sidelined in favor of creating a bland kind of house style for this famous sci-fi franchise. Simply put, they didn’t want a Star Wars comedy. They wanted a safe action/adventure movie that didn’t take any risks. Howard went on to deliver a perfectly serviceable film, of course; more notably, Lord and Miller went on to write and produce the Spider-Verse movies for Sony, and those are considered some of the best animated films and superhero films ever made.
For Kathleen Kennedy, There Was No Try
While many fans hated The Last Jedi for various reasons, Kennedy arguably did something similar when she brought J.J. Abrams back for The Rise of Skywalker, where he promptly undid almost everything Johnson tried to set up. Johnson took (for better or for worse) one creative risk after another, whereas Abrams previously made sure The Force Awakens was nothing more than a soft reboot of the first Star Wars movie. Unsurprisingly, he transformed TROS into a soft reboot of Return of the Jedi, complete with a Jedi confronting Emperor Palpatine while Lando Calrissian in the Millennium Falcon led a fleet that took out an evil empire’s latest superweapons.
The creative failures of The Rise of Skywalker are even worse when you consider that Disney fired original director Colin Trevorrow, who had a very different vision for the movie. He had a tale in which Rey learned to embrace both the Light Side and the Dark Side, Rose crashed the First Order flagship onto Coruscant, and Finn led a Stormtrooper revolution. The leaked script of Trevorrow’s movie (Duel of the Fates) sounds infinitely better than what we got from J.J. Abrams, and the main reason is that Trevorrow had his own unique vision for Star Wars while Abrams was a company man who played things so safe that we haven’t had a new movie in this franchise since 2019.
Somehow, Star Wars Returned
Now, Shawn Levy has said that Kathleen Kennedy didn’t lay any expectations on him for Starfighter, instead trusting him to bring his own vision to life and to give the film his signature style. On paper, this seems very different from the Kennedy who fired Lord and Miller and who brought Abrams back for The Rise of Skywalker. Hopefully, she has learned that fans just want a good movie instead of one that has had all of its personality and creativity shaved off in the name of safe, unoffensive movies that get shoehorned into the franchise’s increasingly garbled mythology.
Hopefully, Starfighter ends up being as crowd-pleasing as Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine. By all accounts, that was a movie where the director and actors had the creative freedom to make the exact kind of movie they wanted to see on the big screen. If Kathleen Kennedy is finally adopting this Marvel mindset for Disney’s other major franchise, we might all be paraphrasing Poe Dameron in a few years: somehow, Star Wars returned.
