It is an undeniable reality that Lucasfilm has a spotty track record of getting movies done in the Disney era.
Every film they’ve released since Disney bought the company has experienced significant production problems, with the sole exception of The Last Jedi, and there have been a litany of projects quite publicly left on the cutting room floor. It hasn’t always been pretty.
But how abnormal is that?
Recently, Deadline sat down with Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy for an interview about her future with the company, and it ventured into the filmmaking process and the future for Star Wars. At one point she was asked about how much harder it is to develop movies with such a rabid fan base, when things get reported as being chaos. Her response is worth considering:
“What you just said, though, is so interesting to me, Mike, because that is the development. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing Star Wars or anything else. 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 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. So there’s constant discussion around that. So yeah, that’s a tricky one because a lot of the scrutiny around Star Wars and the negativity has been about development. Of course, we’re going to develop lots of different things with an understanding that not everything gets made.”
Here it is appropriate for us to pause and remember: Kathy Kennedy is among the most successful filmmakers in history. She is the third-highest grossing producer in the history of Hollywood, behind only Kevin Feige (who runs Marvel Studios) and David Heyman (who produced the Harry Potter franchise). She has worked on films and franchises like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones, among others – not to mention her recent work on Star Wars. Eight different films that she has produced have received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. She has worked extensively with people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, co-founded her own production company, and was Lucas’s personal pick to replace him at Lucasfilm. She has been co-president of the Producers Guild of America, and has been honored by them with the Milestone Award, their highest individual honor.
In other words: like her or not, Kathy Kennedy knows how to produce movies better than almost anybody else.
Which means she knows a thing or two about what she’s talking about, and that’s why it’s so important for her to take a few moments and teach those who have strong opinions online. And what she has to teach is, essentially, this: the development issues that Lucasfilm has had are normal in the industry. It just gets amplified when it’s Star Wars, with such hyper focus on the franchise at all times.
It has been especially interesting to me to watch the discourse over ‘cancelled’ Star Wars projects in recent years. Rarely are the projects that fade away officially announced by Lucasfilm. They have been, of course – like Rian Johnson’s trilogy or Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron – but it is more common for one of the Hollywood trades to report on a Star Wars project in development, which doesn’t get officially announced by the company, and later fades away. In that case, it seems like something perfectly normal for any studio to have happen, it’s just that this studio can’t do much without the internet finding out rumors about it.
Of course, this isn’t disconnected from larger cultural movements, many of which have been brought about by the advent of the internet and social media (yes, I recognize the irony of sharing this on a random internet blog). What’s happened is a larger cultural shift toward de-valuing so-called ‘experts’ and treating every voice online as having similar, if not equal, credibility. When that happens, then people see no problem whatsoever trusting a random commentator they’ve found on YouTube to give them a more accurate picture than one of the world’s most successful producers. This is aided by the cultural shift toward distrusting those in authority, so as to assume that those in positions like this one are automatically hiding things and we have to go to ‘whistleblowers’ elsewhere to find out what’s really going on. Though these things have redemptive qualities that make the internet wonderful, they are by and large negatively affecting the way we can actually share and discuss information.
So this is something that’s bigger than just Star Wars, but it’s something that a well-known and loved franchise like this one probably faces in exceptional ways. People are paying attention all the time. That’s the wonderful draw of Star Wars, but also the thing that makes the Lucasfilm President an especially difficult decision. Those of us who spend our time online would do well to listen to the expert and learn a bit from Kathy Kennedy here.
Star Wars Thoughts 