Star Wars was the biggest franchise in cinema history. Yes, I know that James Bond, LOTR, and Harry Potter exist, but Star Wars was still the biggest. A cultural juggernaut. When Kathleen Kennedy took over, and it was a huge responsibility resting on her shoulders.
Now, it should have been a license to print money. Sure, it cost Disney $4 billion to buy it, but they would make that back easily, right? Yes, they have made the money back, but with an investment like this, it should have been making so much money that they could have bought a few small countries.
Skip a few years, and Star Wars is in the toilet. Sure, there are a few die-hard ‘fans’ still loving all things Star Wars regardless, but we all know it’s a flaming pile of hot garbage.
This year, Kennedy finally stepped down, to rapturous applause of the fans of the franchise. Now, the poor lady has recently said she felt ‘a bit of relief’ after stepping down.
Yeah, Kath, we all felt it.
Kennedy said in an interview at Bloomberg’s annual screentime event in L.A.:
“I suppose there’s a bit of relief. These jobs are not easy and stepping into something like that that George [Lucas] had created was an incredible challenge.”
Yeah, stepping into George’s shoes and then completely destroying his properties. Star Wars is in the shitter, Indiana Jones had a terrible outing in Dial of Destiny, and the reboot of Willow was so bad, they had to delete it off the Disney+ servers.
Proud to be proud?
Ultimately though, she was proud of what she accomplished. Especially the Sequel Trilogy, Mandalorian and Andor:
“I mean, I don’t think you can do anything in terms of the movie business where every single thing is going to be a perfect hit. I think you learn things, I always like learning things from the movies that we do, the postmortems we do on what worked, what didn‘t. But I’m always proud of the work that’s been done.”
You learned things? I mean… I just can’t.
‘Creative Differences’
In the interview, she was also asked about the firing of Phil Lord and Chris Miller from Solo: A Star Wars Story. Asked about what it was like to be an executive charged with dismissing certain people rather than just supporting filmmakers, Kennedy said:
“Well, that really only happened once, thank god.”
Once? My favourite part about her firing Lord and Miller is that they went on to win an Oscar for Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.
I guess she had to fire them, as they probably had really good ideas and wanted to make a great movie.
Am I being a little bit harsh on poor ol’ Kennedy? We should all cut her a break, right?
