May the Force be with Kathleen Kennedy

Kathleen Kennedy and the eleventy billion notifications

This morning, I woke up to eleventy billion notifications from a single comment I made on a Lucasfilm Instagram post.

People simultaneously accused me of being on drugs, writing rage bait, and being a bot.

But by far the most pervasive comment was NO SHE WONT.

What comment caused such vitriol?

As the featured image shows, I said that Kathleen Kennedy “will be missed” on the post announcing her decision to step down as head of Lucasfilm.

For years—and I mean YEARS—the Star Wars fanboys have predicted Kennedy’s departure from Lucasfilm. They have blamed her for every single film, TV show, or cartoon that they didn’t like. No matter which director was involved or how well the property did at the box office, everything was Kathleen Kennedy’s fault.

Despite the fact that Tony Gilroy recently said Andor would not have been possible without her, these fanboys made it abundantly clear she will NOT be missed.

Except that she will be missed. Very much.

Kennedy has had a long and successful career as a producer in Hollywood before she came to Lucasfilm. Among her credits are ET and Jurassic Park, but also the Sixth Sense and Schindler’s List.

That success and goodwill meant that she had the power and influence to not only get the financing needed for the films, but also to protect the creatives as they took risks. Few creatives took as many risks as Rian Johnson, whose Last Jedi is my comfort watch—and possibly my favorite Star Wars movie.

In a recent Deadline interview, Kennedy said:

“I do believe he got spooked by the online negativity. I think Rian made one of the best Star Wars movies. He’s a brilliant filmmaker and he got spooked. This is the rough part. When people come into this space, I have every filmmaker and actors say to me, “What’s going to happen?” They’re a little scared.”

I would be scared too if I had to deal with the level of vitriol that Star Wars online fanboys spew at cast, crew, and everyone in between.

Editor’s note: Rian Johnson has now replied to the original reporting with the following quote tweet:

lol zero spooked, sorry

For a group of people who says they love Star Wars, they sure don’t like the people who make Star Wars very much.

The hunt for Ben Solo and belonging

I am an old school Star Wars fan.

I was just 6 years old when Star Wars came out. It was a life-changing experience for me. I had most of the toys. They’ve long since sunk into the sandbox we had in Florida, much like Boba Fett in the Salacc pit. When I struggle to read—which happens more than my 53 books in 2025 would lead you to believe—my comfort read is Brotherhood by Mike Chen. I love the franchise so much I applied to work as an editor at the new narrative arts museum a few months ago.

But I have always struggled in the fandom. I love following creators like Dr Danielle, who created some awesome Andor content and Master Alan, who brings a martial arts perspective.

I have met a few friends through our mutual love of Star Wars. One thing that unites us is our dislike for the Fandom Menace—the toxic, hypermasculine part of the fandom that leaves hate comments on a benign announcement post. The Fandom Menace viciously turned on Lucas himself and has attacked actors in every movie since he sold the franchise to Disney.

Kennedy has been a frequent target for reasons that baffle me. Well, not really, but you know what I mean. Today’s fans know way more about the production side of things than we did during the first trilogy.

Starting with the prequels—and their behind-the-scenes special editions—fans learned so much more about the people who make the movies we love so much. From Ben Burtt to Doug (an especially dangerous dug) Chiang, we followed their hero’s journey through all the movie landscapes of sound and vision that they created at Industrial Light and Magic.

With the advent of social media, those insights were amplified, and so were the very loud opinions of a few fans that loved to hate the movies they loved so much.

Whenever I encounter the Fandom Menace, I remember what Soren Kierkegaard once wrote about haters:

Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence… They show me respect precisely by showing me that they don’t respect me.

He would have loved Twitter.

The power of story

I have said elsewhere that I believe your first Star Wars movie informs your expectations in a way that’s often hard for casual fans to appreciate.

It’s like that first experience freezes you in an almost permanent nostalgia about how that first movie made you feel. You spend the rest of your time trying to reach for that stardust as you create your head canon. Luke becomes who you need him to be. That was always Lucas’ magic. And while I loathe Joseph Campbell with the heat of the dual suns of Tatooine, I cannot deny that Lucas remains his greatest student.

Too often that head canon goes unacknowledged, as do the deep, complicated feelings we have for the characters. And if a film doesn’t reproduce those exact feelings that you have, it’s Kennedy’s fault.

As the franchise has gone global, the Lucasfilm team has moved beyond the blond farmboy trope and offered films and TV shows that de-center that experience and expand the universe. That de-centering means that the core audience—young white men—are no longer the only audience the films must serve. Audiences in other cultures have different expectations about storytelling.

I have said before that the Campbellian focus on monomyth appealed to young white American men who had no national myth to call their own. That storytelling style then became so embedded in our movie narratives that they have internalized that monomyth as their own.

When Star Wars films or TV shows pivot from that monomyth—as the Acolyte did—the core audience rejects it. For them, any challenge to that myth is personal and political.

Depending on the property, the target audience may reach beyond the core group. They deserve to see themselves in the stories, too. Kennedy and her team understood that, and they understood the value of moving beyond the U.S. market for audience share. Films credited to Kennedy have grossed more than $11 billion, so I would say her strategy has worked.

It’s certainly worked for me. I see myself in Star Wars now in a way I didn’t when I was younger. I loved both Andor and the Acolyte. #RenewTheAcolyte.

In these shows, I saw storytelling as a space where story transforms from a simple noun into a powerful verb filled with stardust—and hope.

I have Kathleen Kennedy to thank for that.

May the Force be with her—always.