Star Wars is broken, Kathleen Kennedy broke it, and Disney doesn’t know how to fix it or who is going to fix it for them.
Disney staged a big “secret” conference call with ranking people in the Star Wars division. Security guards were posted outside the doors at offices to prevent eavesdropping. Pixar and Marvel representatives were able to listen in on the call, but not speak on it. Apparently this was allowed to get feedback, I guess at a later point, about the Star Wars situation.
Disney’s head Bob Iger wants to fire Kathleen Kennedy, but there’s a problem: No one they’re willing to offer the job to is willing to take it. JJ Abrams (Randolph reports) was offered the job, but turned it down flat. “Several” were approached.
One person that’s brought up as a possible replacement for Kennedy, Dave Filloni, isn’t being considered for the job by Iger, I guess because he hasn’t run anything big like a studio.
Randolph says (speculating, I think) that no one wants the job because the Lucasfilm team is divided between old-guard Star Wars people and Kennedy’s handpicked loyalists.
I would speculate myself that, assuming this claim that no one wants the job is true, it’s because the brand is broken, and people know that, and it’s a no-win situation: Everyone seems to think that Star Wars is supposed to make money automatically. That’s no longer true post-Solo, but people still think that, so any head of Lucasfilm is in a situation where the best they can do is meet expectations (make money), and the worst they can do is fail spectacularly.
There’s no upside. Well, except a huge pile of money, but I imagine the people being approached are already getting huge piles of money from other ventures with more of an upside as far as their reputations.
So no big-name person would want to walk into that situation. Smaller names would take that chance, but apparently Disney hasn’t gotten desperate enough to offer it to a smaller name. Yet.
Randolph says that Disney feels that Star Wars is too targeted to “older SJWs,” instead of its traditional fan base of men, and this is also hurting Star Wars in its merchandise sales, as “older SJWs” don’t really buy movie tickets and certainly don’t spend a lot of money on Milennium Falcon playsets.
She also reports that all the Star Wars “anthology” movies are indeed on hold as Disney tries to figure this out, except maybe for one: The Obi-Wan movie, which Disney thinks it should have made instead of Star Wars. However, while this movie is not officially on hold, it’s also not on the front-burner, either.
SJWs are corporate cancer. I’m glad I didn’t finish the book in January like I’d originally planned. To quote the former Disney employee formerly known as The Sports Guy, “The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.”