Brian Earl Spilner said:
Ok, I have some thoughts.
I have been a pretty staunch defender of Kathleen Kennedy up to this point. She's been responsible for some of the biggest box office hits of all time, including the highest-grossing movie in Force Awakens.
But enough is enough. There seems to be NO order behind the scenes at Lucasfilm.
Look, I know we don't have all the details with whatever happened with D&D. But, it almost doesn't matter. Either Kennedy fired them and allowed them to make a statement to save face, or D&D decided to leave of their own accord. But either way, it's a terrible look for Lucasfilm.
We are talking about the best and biggest media franchise in American entertainment. If things are bad enough that the guys you hired to shepherd the next phase of your franchise, jump ship for Netflix?
It's either that, or you are making official announcements way before you should, counting your eggs before they hatch, or whatever you want to call it.
But this is not the kind of thing that should be happening. And the buck stops with Kathleen. Things are clearly a cluster**** behind the scenes and nobody is steering the ship.
It's time for a change. Get Favreau in there. Get Filoni. Get JJ. I don't care who it is, but it needs to be someone who the company can rally behind and who will clean up whatever mess is going on right now.
I could well be overreacting, but this is happened too many times by now. The writing is on the wall with the Rian Johnson deal, so expect that story to hit within the next few months, too.
This latest announcement is really odd. Either:
1) Lucasfilm (Kennedy) either screwed something up again or went back on their word
2) D&B signed the Netflix deal and over extended themselves.
I'm thinking '2' might be the issue. These are two huge projects. You cant split your time towards both and expect to come up with a quality project. These guys may be great at world building, but this was a stupid greedy decision. And to pick Netflix over SW (which basically this amounts to) is idiotic. Netflix is a massive jenga tower ready to fall down at any moment. If they choose Netflix (money) over SW, then these are not the guys telling the story.
As far as getting rid of Kennedy, I agree. She needs to go. After the disaster of TLJ which showed no planning (how in the heck can you not have this trilogy not mapped out from day 1), and the disaster that was Solo (which in the end I thought was a good movie).. it just shows a lack of leadership.
I agree, I would love to have either Favreau or Filoni. Favreau is not practical. He has too many things going on, but Filoni would be great. It will be interesting to see how Feige inserts himself into all this now. Maybe that is what they are setting him up for.