Disney Deathcart 2/25/25

Kathleen Kennedy will be stepping down as the head of LucasFilm at the end of this year.

I had an article on Chuck Dixon’s Team 7 mostly done when I finally became convinced that this story is legitimate.

#DoomcockWasRight. He was just ahead of the powercurve by five years.

This is about as unofficially official as it gets. Variety, Hollywood Reporter and the high level shills like John Campea are reporting this as a done deal. 

This is the strongest indication there is that Bob Iger will definitely be retiring as CEO at the end of the year.  The first thing any new CEO is going to want to get a handle on is the worst-performing division and Disney’s deepest money pit is unquestionably LucasFilm. 

When Bob Iger bought it up in 2012, it looked like it would be the jewel in Disney’s crown and very, very briefly it was.  Truth be told back then the vast majority of fans approved of the sale when they first heard of it. Disney had been doing great with Marvel, (although it turned out that was Ike Perlmutter’s doing).  More importantly Disney had an actual track record as the conservator of a galaxy far, far away.

From my forthcoming, The Decline and Fall of the Devil Mouse:

“Another way that George Lucas kept his franchises fresh in people’s minds was his relationship with the Walt Disney Company. 

Lucas and Michael Eisner had worked well together on the Indiana Jones movies when he was at Paramount. Truth be told George had a better relationship with Paramount than he did with 20th Century Fox, then home of the Star Wars franchise.   When Eisner came to Disney he immediately started wooing George to come and create attractions for his new company’s theme parks.  George was interested, he wanted a break from filmmaking and this was something new and different. 

The first project was a sweet little oddity called Captain Eo, starring Michael Jackson and Anjelica Huston.  All it really was, was a 20-minute 3D music.  Lucas was producing, Francis Ford Coppola was directing, James Horner composed the non-Jackson music, John Napier (costume designer for Cats) was in charge of costuming, and Rick Baker provided special makeup effects. All of this collected talent meant that Captain Eo soared magnificently over budget to $26 million. To make matters worse the footage of Michael’s dancing horrified 1980s Disney executives because Jackson was at the point in his career where he was crotch grabbing and pelvis thrusting almost continuously.  

Captain Eo was to quote a critic “A glorious surface over a void… like chocolate Easter bunny, there is nothing inside.” Like I said, it was 3D music video.  Now arguably, people should never have been expecting more than that but given the list of credits, they did. The show ran more or less continuously until 1994. It’s not entirely a failure but it’s not on anyone’s list of favorite attractions either.

Star Tours on the other hand is in the running for the best attraction Eisner ever came up with.  A space simulator ride had been on the shelf for a few years.  Imagineering had originally developed it for the Black Hole, but when that bombed, further development was immediately halted.  George Lucas ran across it when Michael Eisner was giving him a tour of Imagineering. Unlike Captain EO, Star Tours is still taking guests across a galaxy far, far away today.  Its longevity is mostly to do with its ability to be reprogrammed. You don’t know which adventure you are going to get. The original trilogy is the most popular, with the podracing sequence coming second. The First Order adventure frequently gets booed.”

George had been going downhill for a while, we all knew it. Fan relations had been seriously deteriorating between George and the Star Wars faithful since the Phantom Menace.   While George had been high enough on the Hollywood food chain that he had been able to shield himself from the slings and arrows of outraged fandom for most of his career… until the internet arrived. 

By 2012 it was impossible for George to avoid being told the emperor had no clothes.  His children weren’t following in his footsteps as a creative and I strongly suspect, Mellody Hobson (his new wife who wouldn’t even hyphenate) was very much in favor of George cashing out for fairly obvious reasons. A company that is worth 4 billion is not actually money you can spend and her new husband was very likely to precede her to the grave by a substantial number of years.

Disney was the only company big enough to afford it.  Although, Lucas was very reluctant to sell.  Shortly before the deal was closed he hired Kathleen Kennedy to be the new president of LucasFilm.  

Iger was reportedly startled by the old man’s power play but he decided he could accept it. After all Kathleen Kennedy’s name had been attached to some of the biggest hits of the last 30 years. She had solid connections with people that Iger had pissed off when he fired Dick Cook.  He decided to accept it as a win/win.  

The Force Awakens was a major win for Iger and Kennedy. At $2 billion it was the biggest box office take Disney had ever had up to that point in the company’s history.  And while Rogue One broke the hearts of Kyle Katarn fans, it brought in another $1 billion.

But there was a bit of disquiet in the fandom.  It was the kind of thing where you wander into a light spray of bleach in the air.  You know something is wrong, but it’s not a big enough problem to worry about. The thing was, upon repeated viewing of The Force Awakens, the bleach turns from a fine mist to a choking fog.  Its fundamental flaws became more blatantly obvious the longer you considered them.  Then came The Last Jedi and the bleach was being sprayed directly into your eyes.

I have no idea how it made $1.3 billion. But the underperformance against expectations troubled the C-suite at Disney.  Then it set off a panic when Solo became the first Star Wars bomb ever. 

The backlash became so intense that Disney lost control of the narrative. Critics and fan media outlets like Nerdist and Kotaku had been purchased by companies like Gawker who did not like to offend major advertisers like Disney. Consequently, fans looking for opinions they agreed with turned to YouTube.

These fan critics were denounced as GamerGaters and in truth they were right to call us that.  All of the players were there, we’d just found something else that Clown World was destroying and called them out on it. 

LucasFilm had one last Indian Summer with the first season of The Mandalorian. However, the company’s corporate culture was destroyed when they moved from Skywalker Ranch to the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the heart of San Francisco.  LucasFilm wasn’t just opposed to its fans’ point of view, there was now an open hatred of them. 

It was obvious to everyone that what Kathleen Kennedy wanted most in the world was a new Woke fandom that only existed in the hearts of Tumblr. LucasFilm eventually became a vanity project. 

Kathleen Kennedy managed to stay in her job for 13 years despite being the most hated film executive of all time and governing over a series of underperformances, bombs, broken key talent links, and fan revilement.  

When Solo bombed fans were convinced at the time that Kennedy would soon be sent packing.  After all the head of all of Disney Studios had been fired for a similar failure with John Carter. Every new failure would bring rumors of her impending demise. Doomcock the YouTube fan pundit eventually destroyed his once formidable reputation with repeated promises that she would soon be leaving. 

It didn’t make sense to people outside of Disney that she would still be in charge of her division despite historic bombs Indiana Jones V, Willow II, the Galactic Star Cruiser, and fan relations that couldn’t be more toxic. 

But if you were on the inside of Disney then it made all kinds of sense.  Firing Kathleen Kennedy was something you didn’t dare breathe about. She was a hero to people like Peter Rice and Dana Walden.  Then there were the institutional investors like Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street.  They didn’t mind so long damaged profits as long as she delivered the kind of messages that Larry Fink and Tim Buckley wanted to hear.

However, even the most glorious reign must end someday. Kathleen Kennedy has been rumored to be wanting to leave on a high note.  However, that was extremely unlikely from a financial point of view, so she appears to have settled for the good reviews Andor season 2 will probably get.

I am reluctant to call this good news.  At this point it doesn’t matter who is leaving, the damage is done.  The real question is who will be replacing her? 

Discuss in the comments below