During Kathleen Kennedy’s 13-year reign as president of Lucasfilm, which will come to an end with her reported retirement later this year, the production company turned out 57 hours and 36 minutes of Star Wars content – plus whatever the second season of Andor amounts to, when it lands on Disney+ this April. But even so, perhaps the most striking about a tenure that has proven wobblier than Millennium Falcon asteroid field dash is the sheer number of films she didn’t eventually make.
The list of announced then scrapped or dumped-in-limbo projects is enough to make R2D2’s head twirl, complete with the obligatory whistly bloops and bleeps. Not one, nor two, nor three, but four brand-new trilogies have been proudly announced then either sheepishly binned, or buried under blankets of ominous silence.
Entirely separately to these mammoth undertakings, golden boys and girls were pinched from rival cinematic universes – Kevin Feige, Taika Waititi, Josh Trank and Shawn Levy from Marvel, and Patty Jenkins from DC – and presented with blank cheques for one-off projects which all subsequently appear to have bounced. At one point, Jenkins’s film was enough of a sure thing to merit an official teaser trailer, in which the Wonder Woman director and fighter pilot’s daughter was seen pulling on a Rebel Alliance flight suit and clambering into the cockpit of an X-Wing.
But then after years of intermittent chirps of “it’s still happening, honest”, her Rogue Squadron was quietly shelved in 2023. A film centred on Daisy Ridley’s Rey, about the forming of a New Jedi Order, sounds like a no-brainer: it would be a direct sequel to the most recent Star Wars film.
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Yet since it was announced almost two years ago, it has shed three high-profile writers, Damon Lindelof, Justin Britt-Gibson and Steven Knight – its latest is George Nolfi, of Ocean’s Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum – while little about its director, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Pakistani-Canadian documentary maker who oversaw a couple of Ms Marvel episodes, screams “seasoned studio journeyman and all-around safe pair of hands”. (Then again, James Mangold’s proposed space epic about the founding of the Jedi Order doesn’t seem to be going anywhere either.)
The only theatrical project to have actually made it in front of a camera since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker is a feature-length spin-off to the popular streaming series The Mandalorian. This was apparently filmed last year, though for some reason the finished film won’t see the inside of a cinema until May 2026. Considering Star Wars’ original appeal was anchored in its fairy-tale simplicity – rural blue-eyed stripling teams up with local wizard and loveable rascal to save the princess and overthrow the evil king – the Kennedy approach felt madly overthought.
When Kennedy succeeded George Lucas in 2012 – having previously worked with the Star Wars creator on the Indiana Jones films as a co-founder of Amblin Entertainment – it looked as if she was setting herself up for a late-career victory lap. The mission seemed simple: oversee the production of Disney’s impending “sequel trilogy”, which would tie up Lucas’s own years-in-the-making Skywalker Saga, while turning his brainchild into the sort of IP which – a la Marvel – could be milked from 15 angles at once.
At first, everything was working nicely: her back-to-basics Episode VII, The Force Awakens, became the highest-grossing film ever made, while Gareth Edwards’s Rogue One plugged a narrative gap that had intrigued fans since the release of Lucas’s 1977 original.
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But barely a year later, panic was already setting in. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the two brilliant pop-art auteurs behind The Lego Movie and the Jump Street comedies, were hired and then fired as directors on a Han Solo-led swashbuckling romp, reportedly because the film they were making just didn’t feel Star Wars-y enough.
That concern made sense – the series’ signatures have always been its slightly earnest tone and home-made sensibility, that made it possible for a generation of kids to recreate with little more than cardboard boxes, yoghurt pots and dressing gowns. But when the tonally spot-on yet politically provocative Episode VIII, The Last Jedi, was released, the panic bloomed into perpetual corporate meltdown.
The Star Wars fanbase, it transpired, was not as uniformly receptive to 2010s US metropolitan progressivism as the Marvel one. A stubborn, noisy rump of refuseniks dug in online, and held up Rian Johnson’s sequel-trilogy centrepiece – for me, one of the greatest blockbusters of its decade, perhaps second only to Mad Max: Fury Road – was Woke Hollywood at its smirkingly elitist peak. (For which read: capable women dressing down hotheaded men, multiple subversions of lore, and lots of Grumpy Old Luke.)
Kennedy’s response was to drag the trilogy back to the centre ground – perhaps again to try and recapture the increasingly elusive Lucas “feel”. The original, equally incendiary Episode IX, titled The Duel of the Fates, was reworked into the fun but inoffensively squishy The Rise of Skywalker, which reinstalled The Force Awakens’ JJ Abrams as director, revived the Emperor as a heritage baddie, and doubled down on Lucas’s family-tree based plotting, to the whole trilogy’s gross thematic detriment.
Still, the first part of her mission was done and dusted. But the second – Marvelising Star Wars – would utterly defeat her. The Mandalorian morphed from Star Wars at its most primordial (wind-whipped western and samurai thrills) into mid-tier Star Trek, while the slew of subsequent series all failed to recapture its initial, richly atmospheric magic.
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The problem was – and perhaps here lies a cautionary tale for the executives at Amazon, whose minds must be boggling at what they might be able to wring from those James Bond rights – Star Wars thrived on its imagination-sparking gaps. In Lucas’s original films, Boba Fett was a tantalisingly enigmatic figure. After seven episodes of his own standalone series, plus multiple walk-ons in other people’s, however, he was just another twerp with a bucket on his head. The prospect of the return of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi drove attendees at Disney’s D23 convention wild in 2019. But when was the last time you heard fans talk about the drab, meandering result?
Tony Gilroy’s Andor presented fans with a grippingly slow-burn drama about the initial sparks of insurrection in 2022, but Dave Filoni’s Ahsoka, released the following year, played like mindless cartoon apocrypha, while 2024’s disastrous The Acolyte ploughed headlong into the political fray Kennedy pointedly abandoned five years previously.
That series up being watched almost exclusively by angry YouTubers, who’d post snarky takedowns after every episode dropped. (With a reported budget of $230 million, the show cost almost $700,000 per minute of screen time: let’s just say the spend is not immediately apparent.)
Why did it all go so wrong? Because – as Hollywood has started to discover in the last few years to its cost – the cinematic universe business model is neither endlessly accommodating nor endlessly exploitable. Even the most beloved franchises cinema ever came up with might not survive it. Remember when Star Wars was one of those?
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