Earlier this week, reports started circulating—starting from Puck News—that Kathleen Kennedy was on the way out at Lucasfilm. Kennedy has, of course, been the primary architect of the Star Wars universe ever since George Lucas sold the franchise to Disney in 2012, with the result that she typically gets blamed for both the franchise’s successes and, more notably over the last few years, its failures. Now, Kennedy has given an interview mostly denying the retirement rumors, stating that, while she has been in conversations with Disney’s Bob Iger and Alan Bergman “for quite some time” about a succession plan, “The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring.” Among other things, Kennedy pushed back on any questions on when an announcement of a plan for her to step down from her position might come, saying that, when it comes, it’ll be months or even a year ahead of a possible departure. In any case, Kennedy pushed back hard on the Puck framing that she was on her way out, like, this week.
Talking to Deadline, Kennedy also focused on the near-future of the franchise, noting that she’s currently busy producing the Mandalorian film, as well as setting up the latest film from Deadpool 2 director Shawn Levy. While doing the round-up of potential Star Wars film projects, Kennedy also namechecked James Mangold’s forthcoming effort—delayed a bit by the Oscars buzz around A Complete Unknown—and emphasized that Simon Kinberg is hard at work on developing a new trilogy. (She also noted that the long-prophesied Taika Waititi Star Wars movie is still waiting on Waititi to actually write the damn thing—”I think if we ever do get a script from Taika, it’s going to be fantastic”—and Rian Johnson’s name literally didn’t come up.)
While talking through some Star Wars boilerplate—the franchise aspires to be multi-generational, allowing new viewers to fall in love with it without having had to necessarily start with George Lucas’ original films, etc.—Kennedy also voiced some frustrations with how the series’ film fortunes have been treated by the public in recent years:
What’s troubling and frustrating is that our development gets scrutinized, and I don’t know any other production company where their development gets scrutinized like that. It’s very hard for anything to happen within Star Wars without some aspect of it becoming public before you even want it to become public. So I guess managing the message in some way is also quite a challenge because of course, not every single thing we put in development are we going to make. That’s not unusual. We want to make those things that we feel are the best. We want to make those things that, as time passes, feel relevant to what the audience is responding to.
Kennedy ended the interview by pointedly not answering a straight question about whether she would “step out as Lucasfilm boss this year” before making it clear that, when she leaves the top job, it’ll be on her own terms: “It’s my decision. This is 100 percent my decision.”
