I’ll Believe It When I see it
Apparently, this one is making the rounds again.
I’ve been hearing rumors of Kathleen Kennedy’s imminent departure from LucasFilm for years now and it has never happened yet.
I admit her continued employment at Disney flies in the face of both business and common sense. She is unquestionably the worst brand manager in the entire history of all entertainment.
The Force Awakens was a competent restart if drearily unoriginal. Its primary problem was that once people had a chance to think about the parts that didn’t work the whole thing started falling apart in their heads.
I’ll grant the first ten minutes were good. Kylo Ren had a decent introduction. So did Finn and Po. Rey’s plight was initially rather engaging, the girl who was scavenging for a living and only getting “1/4 portion” of food for her work. She even looked like she was starving to death. It was a good start but a good introduction when followed up by a bad story means nothing.
The Last Jedi did find the new audience that the Woke is always going on about, but it turned out to be a small legion of fanfic girls who wanted Kylo and Rey to hook up. Or Po and Finn. It was in every way available to it, cinematic incompetence on every level. George Lucas had created a story that was very much one of good versus evil. The Last Jedi painted this black-and-white universe in shades grey, thus completely betraying Lucas’s authorial intent.
I am willing to give Ryan Johnson this much, I suspect he only did what Kathleen Kennedy and her LucasFilm Story Group wanted him to do. The guy was a small timer with one film under his belt, of course, he did whatever they told him to. But he owns the result, and he knows it.
The fanbase was irretrievably broken by that one movie. There were plenty of people like Doomcock saying if Disney would just retcon it all away, then all good. Sorry, no. Even if they had done that, the audience would not have been able to unsee it. It is always going to be there at the back of their minds.
The Rise of Skywalker tried to undo the damage, in truth, most of it was a rebuke of the previous movie. But it couldn’t work. There were so many reshoots the final price tag was around $500 million. The domestic box office take was $515 million. After the theatrical cut, Disney got $250 million. The FBO was $557 million and Disney saw a lot less than 50% of that take. Add in the hundreds of millions spent on marketing and Disney had to have lost hundreds of millions.
All of that would have been acceptable but the real Star Wars gold mine had a catastrophic cave-in. The merchandising collapsed irretrievably.
Solo lost a lot more money than Rise of Skywalker.
So, it was hardly surprising, that the longtime fans declared that Kathleen Kennedy was going to be fired.
Who needed proof, right? I mean it just stood to reason that that level of performance failure merited removal. Studio mega-moguls have been shitcanned for a lot less.
The key word there was “merit.” That really doesn’t matter too much in the 21st century.
Effective politics means a lot more and Kay Kay is a very, very effective politician. She’s a Boomer who has been in Hollywood since the 1970s when everyone had the brakes off. She knows who had the pedo-harem and who wore a dress made of human skin to the Oscars. She’s untouchable.
Her continued tenure at Disney began to feel like a direct rebuke to the fans. And in a lot of ways, it was.
Admittedly, there was probably a poison pill clause in the contract George Lucas signed with Disney that granted her right of first refusal. But who would want the job of captain of the Titanic after it’s hit the iceberg? No one any good wanted her job after 2017.
Andor’s complete failure at Disney Plus proves that Star Wars Advocate fanbase finally gave up and walked off. The Titanic is now sitting on the ocean floor and whoever takes over the franchise is going to be running a salvage operation.
Anyway, the new rumor about Kennedy’s departure is that she has reached an agreement with Disney regarding her severance package. It is $25 million but mostly in stock options.
I admit the number caught my attention because I’ve never heard actual figures before. Let alone a breakdown of the figures.
Disney’s strategic situation is slightly different now. Everyone knows Disney+ is a disaster, the movies have all underperformed or just bombed outright. And the CEO was carted off and impaled in the middle of a Sunday night. The stock price is extremely depressed, and they need some kind of announcement to get it moving in the right direction.
It says something about the cynicism involved that if Kathleen Kennedy announces her immediate “retirement” after Indy 5 bombs then her Disney stock options may well go up in value.
If true and that is a huge IF, then we should start hearing noises about a replacement soon. Like I said, Star Wars has now bottomed out so there is not much career risk in taking over the franchise.
There is literally no place for LucasFilm to go but up, so it’s minimal risk for whoever takes it over.
But it’s never going to be what it was.
Okay, I’m done here.
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