Anyway: A huge “Who da man? Yo da man!” to long-time Star Wars writer and producer Dave Filoni, who has just been named Chief Creative Officer and Co-President of Lucasfilm, filling the latter job alongside long-time Lucasfilm Business head Lynwen Brennan. The pair will co-fill the chair now vacated by decade-plus Star Wars head honcho Kathleen Kennedy, who took the job at Lucasfilm shortly before George Lucas sold the company to Disney back in 2012, serving as Lucas’ hand-picked steward and chief decision maker for the brand throughout the conglomerate’s ownership of the franchise.
Kennedy’s departure from the role isn’t exactly a big surprise: She’s been talking about stepping back from the high-pressure, high-getting-yelled-at-by-randos job for at least a few years at this point. (An exit interview she gave to Deadline today suggests she stayed on longer than intended in part to help Filoni bulk out his resumé; he came to the franchise as a writer and animator, but has spent the last few years getting experience as a live-action director on shows like Ahsoka in order to round out his “running a movie studio” skillset.) The news, not coincidentally, was timed to the reveal that filming has wrapped on Shawn Levy and Ryan Gosling’s Star Wars: Starfighter, the second Star Wars movie to wrap since the franchise took its little seven-year theater nap after the release of The Rise Of Skywalker in 2019. (The other, the Filoni-penned The Mandalorian And Grogu, arrives in theaters this May.)
The division of labor in the new Lucasfilm isn’t difficult to parse: Brennan’s a stalwart of the company’s business side, having spent 26 years rising up through the ranks at Industrial Light & Magic, and will presumably handle the technical and money portions of the equation, as she has done for years. Filoni, meanwhile, has carved out a name for himself mostly through his work in TV, first in the Clone Wars animated series, and then by essentially asserting himself as the only person who seemed to have an actual narrative plan for this universe in the aftermath of the sequel trilogy’s various highs and lows. (One of the chief architects of The Mandalorian, he’s noted for being an inveterate lore guy, and has never been shy about jabbing Star Wars fans’ nostalgia buttons as needed to give his various productions a boost.) Given that you were never going to find any human being alive who all Star Wars fans were going to instantly rally behind, it’s not hard to see why he was the easy pick for CCO: Give or take a Book Of Boba Fett here or there, he’s made it clear that he knows how to generate steady, crowd-pleasing adventure stories that trot out all the right signs and signifiers without rocking the spaceship. He’s never been the guy to make something bold and groundbreaking like, say, Tony Gilroy’s Andor. But, as Kennedy’s exit interview notes, there are a lot of directors (James Mangold, Taika Waititi, Donald Glover, Steven Soderbergh, and more) who show up wanting to do something bold and groundbreaking with Star Wars, and sometimes you probably need a guy who just knows what color the lightsabers are supposed to be, and who just wants to see the Hero’s Journey play out in a slightly different form. Again.
As for Kennedy, she’s reportedly excited to focus on her passions in life: Making movies with her husband, veteran filmmaker Frank Marshall; producing more Star Wars movies (in a non-running-the-company role); and, obviously, getting seriously into making films with AI. (“In responsible ways,” of course, which nobody, no matter how hard they’re tempted to make the obvious joke, could suggest they have a bad feeling about.)
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