• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Lucasfilm desperately needs new leadership

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Call me nuts, but I thought Solo was decent! Better than some of the mainstream SW movies I saw.

Emilia Clarke hottie boosted my movie score. lol
It was alright, and yeah, bonus points for Emilia Clarke. Don’t even know the name of the guy who played Han Solo though. Generic Man. It didn’t ruin many classic characters at least, other than making Lando some kind of furry, which, well, does kind of count as ruining a classic character.
 

AmuroChan

Member
Does Kathleen Kennedy have unlimited juice at the top of Lucasfilm? Given the trajectory since TLJ, it should be past time for a leadership change, but it's unclear that this will happen any time soon. How would you fix Star Wars and Lucasfilm if given the reins tomorrow?

Her contract expires in 2024. I'm guessing Disney will move on at that point.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
It was alright, and yeah, bonus points for Emilia Clarke. Don’t even know the name of the guy who played Han Solo though. Generic Man. It didn’t ruin many classic characters at least, other than making Lando some kind of furry, which, well, does kind of count as ruining a classic character.

Never heard of him.

Funny thing is when I watched the movie, I didn't know it was Emilia Clarke. I didn't follow who was in the movie and I didn't watch Game of Thrones except a handful of episodes I saw from a coworkers season 1 disc set. I know that actress is from the show, as I remember some early episodes of her nude, but since she was blonde so I didn't recognize/make the connection it was her on Solo until the movie was over. lol
 

BlackTron

Member
Call me nuts, but I thought Solo was decent! Better than some of the mainstream SW movies I saw.

Emilia Clarke hottie boosted my movie score. lol

I thought it was decent too, but Emilia was one of my biggest problems with the movie dragging it down. She just seemed so out of place, like she shouldn't be there, like some real-life girl wearing a dress got the gig to go on the Millennium Falcon set, and not a real Star Wars character.

Mega "I'm the cool one to cast right now" energy, like Tom Holland
 

BadBurger

Is 'That Pure Potato'
All of these properties were prolonged too long IMO. I get that Disney paid whatever billion dollars for them and are going to use them, but whatever.

I'm just sad that they fucked up Indiana Jones. I could give less of a shit about space wizards or whatever, but Indy was me and my older brother's jam growing up. Crystal Skull was frankly cock. Haven't had a chance to see the new movie but my friends are telling me it's not good.
 

phaedrus

Member
TLJ is my favorite Star Wars movie of all of them.

iyxWYjG.gif
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
I don't know what Star Wars needs, but neither does Kathleen Kennedy, and only one of us is getting paid millions for our lack of knowledgeable direction.

What they SHOULD be doing is trying to make a new Star Wars. And not by painting-by-numbers. Take a promising young filmmaker who's hungry (like George Lucas was) and give them an irresponsible amount of money to make something unique. They'll throw away hundreds of millions for a "sure thing" like Star Wars only for it to bomb, so why not try something new?
I understand this point, but Star Wars was of a time and place, that being 1977. You can tell a promising young filmmaker to go wild in this universe but they'll still be in this universe, and hamstrung by it.

We've been living in boomer-world our whole lives, but the fact is, this stuff isn't forever. It has an end date. It's been kept around for longer than it maybe should have just because boomers have been so dominant in culture for so long, but that is fading, and with it their cultural touchstones just like the cultural touchstones of the generations before them did.
 
Last edited:

pel1300

Member
It's like deliberate sabotage what they've done to SW and Indiana Jones. Almost like they had actors within Disney/LF trying to destroy it. It sounds like they ruined Indiana Jones using the exact same blueprint they used for SW.
 
Last edited:

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
If you watch Obi-Wan, make sure you watch the fan-made movie cut. Far more tolerable than the show format. Cut all the lame eye roll fat, but still falls a bit short than it could have been.
 

Lord Panda

The Sea is Always Right
The only way to resuscitate Star Wars is to give Kennedy the boot and roll out the red carpet for Lucas, with rapturous applause and fanfare. But then, the realisation will dawn on everyone that his new trilogy is also as exciting as watching paint dry in zero gravity. At that point, the franchise can take a bow, wave its final goodbyes, and peace out of the galaxy for good. Well done, Disney.
 

Yoda

Member
The only way to save Star Wars is for Lucasfilm to be separated from Disney. Sadly, I can't see that happening. Even if KK were to be fired, what then? Disney senior management endorses her leadership when they've renewed her contract. If they fired her tomorrow, somehow managed to find someone who can A) work within the confines of Disney B) Is competent and only cares for entertaining, not activism... It'd be 3 years before we see a single piece of output that'd have been green-lite by that person. Is it possible to win SW fans back over at that point? Case in point, me. I was a MASSIVE fan growing up. I could even recite every line in the OT from memory due to watching them so often. Now? If ep4 were to be remade by KK's cronies and Luke was bastardized in all the ways we can imagine, I'd probably shrug and move on. :/ Sure I'm older, but there are plenty of franchises which haven't been bastardized which I still thoroughly enjoy, all Lucasfilm IPs are a pile of trash.

Edit: Since the subject is technically all of LF, yeah the other franchises were already dead, KK just proved it with one, maybe soon to be two tax write offs. Doesn't matter what happens to her as far as the non SW properties are concerned.
 
Last edited:

Nydius

Member
The last Jedi is the best Star Wars film since Empire Strike Back, the hate is really baffling to me.

Gonna have to give that a resounding NO.

We spend an obscene amount of time in the movie in a slow speed chase where they're worried about fuel. Goddamn fuel. That is straying into Star Trek territory. Star Wars wasn't concerned about rote, mundane shit like how much fuel a starship needed until they were 'caught'. It was space magic, action, and suspension of disbelief. And then all the tension is resolved by "hurr durr, gonna ram it with a hyperspace jump!". Give me a break.

TLJ was b-tier sci-fi using the Star Wars name.
 
Kathleen Kennedy is never leaving, she is too stubborn to leave. Even if Kathleen Kennedy left, she has had multiple years to install loyal underlings in every department under her leadership. The LucasFilm story group's brainstorming of the High Republic with the dry erase board picture was a huge red flag for the type of staff Kathleen Kennedy had on-board, and unless these people are purged from Disney completely, there will never be a change.

More importantly, the vast majority of modern writers have little talent and have had their brains fried by their addiction to social media. There is nothing left in this cultural wasteland, merely the rotting corpses of the past and the bastard children who are cognitively incapable of perspective-taking.
qkc4pvaqjam41.jpg
 
Last edited:
Kathleen Kennedy is never leaving, she is too stubborn to leave. Even if Kathleen Kennedy left, she has had over a decade to install loyal underlings in every department under her leadership. The LucasFilm story group's brainstorming of the High Republic with the dry erase board picture was a huge red flag for the type of staff Kathleen Kennedy had on-board, and unless these people are purged from Disney completely, there will never be a change.

More importantly, the vast majority of modern writers have little talent and have had their brains fried by their addiction to social media. There is nothing left in this cultural wasteland, merely the rotting corpses of the past and the bastard children who are cognitively incapable of perspective-taking.
qkc4pvaqjam41.jpg

This is why Diversity in the mind, not the body is important

Let me Tell a relevant story

Im a middle class jew from holocaust survivor grandparents , my 2 best friend are 1 a White mexican catholic upper class , 2 low income latino friend who was in army school his entire life, both friends from college

When we make our first business, if we have a problem, we have 3 complete different solutions for everything, for example when we need buy a 1000 Tshirts

A friend check the entire Internet for the best deals on the City
The other go to a dangerous Bazaar, and he work to get best deal posible
I checked my network of jewish people I know, who sell clothes, to have the best deal

If everyone think the same way, you cant make something amazing and thats the issue with Disney, they need to have people from arround the World but Also from the left, right, and center, people who see from more then an ideology, until Disney realize that, we never see something good again
 

UnNamed

Banned
TLJ is a flawed movie. But way better than Winking JJ Abraham's Don't Worry I'll Explain Later: Episode VII and Written By Reddit Episode IX.

Rian Johnson truly understand characters and the fact Lucas wanted do to something similar is the proof the spirit of the saga is there.
 

sobaka770

Banned
I tried to grapple with how this could be possible so I tried to think about the movie from different angles to find some redeeming qualities, such as Luke and Yoda talking together. But that made me think about the movie, which plunged me into depression.

-Space horses galloping on ISDs as an attack force
-Magic glowing Disney animals that lead the path to safety
-The whole casino sequence
-Mary Poppins Leia survives being in space, even though Carrie Fisher even died IRL
-Luke dies from concentrating too hard on the Force
-Adam Driver's villain is such a lame idiot I forget what his name even is
-Rebellion female leader is purple-haired because that's rebellious
-Space bombers that use gravity to drop bombs like B-52s

No matter what happens to this franchise, it will forever be tarnished with the embarrassment that this movie is in it.
Weren't the horses in ep9?

Also the whole bomber thing is using rails to accelerate the bombs - in vacuum of space they would drop down from that. (It's not like rules of space are respected in SW in general)

I can understand other issues, although I love TLJ as the only movie with an actual vision. I just wish Abrams didn't ruin everything good that came from it in TRoS.
 
Last edited:

Tams

Member
Call me nuts, but I thought Solo was decent! Better than some of the mainstream SW movies I saw.

Emilia Clarke hottie boosted my movie score. lol

I liked it.

It probably helped that I went in prepared to rag on it, but spent a good couple of hours with the friend I went with discussing how surprised we were that it was good.
 

Dr.Morris79

Gold Member
I understand this point, but Star Wars was of a time and place, that being 1977. You can tell a promising young filmmaker to go wild in this universe but they'll still be in this universe, and hamstrung by it.

We've been living in boomer-world our whole lives, but the fact is, this stuff isn't forever. It has an end date. It's been kept around for longer than it maybe should have just because boomers have been so dominant in culture for so long, but that is fading, and with it their cultural touchstones just like the cultural touchstones of the generations before them did.
It wouldnt be bad, could be great. But the next generation isnt offering anything better. It's utter garbage.
 

Roufianos

Member
Between RoS, Solo and Indiana Jones, that's 3 massive financial flops in a row.

That would end the career of anyone else. Not to mention how awful some of the TV has been, especially Mando S3 and Boba Fett.

All the cancelled movies too, she's a joke.
 

ADiTAR

ידע זה כוח
It's such a shame, Star Wars could have moved in the direction of Andor and Rogue 1. Being an actual lived in sci-fi fantasy without the silliness that belonged in the 80s.

I don't know why it's so hard to write likable characters, there seem to be such a lack of talent right now in the industry.
 

BlackTron

Member
Weren't the horses in ep9?

Also the whole bomber thing is using rails to accelerate the bombs - in vacuum of space they would drop down from that. (It's not like rules of space are respected in SW in general)

I can understand other issues, although I love TLJ as the only movie with an actual vision. I just wish Abrams didn't ruin everything good that came from it in TRoS.

Oh you're right about the horses. Sorry I've only seen each of these movies once. I'm aware TLJ is the only sequel movie with "vision" and has some of George's ideas in it. Not nearly enough to save the movie, or for "love". In this case, "vision" just means it wasn't a copy/paste remake or a dying corpse attempting to placate fans. Being the only film that attempted to do anything of its own doesn't make it any good, just that it had the balls to be original and come up with its own mistakes.
 

Toots

Gold Member
Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion back in 2012, with Kathleen Kennedy at the helm of Disney's Lucasfilm, these are our results:

Movies
The Force Awakens - inferior remake of Star Wars 1977, but good if one ignores the remainder of the trilogy
Rogue One - Excellent
The Last Jedi - Retroactively ruins Star Wars forever
Solo - Lando comes out as robosexual and robots demand human rights, and there's a train and sexy Emilia Clarke..?? I typically forget that this movie exists
The Rise of Skywalker - The trash we deserve for remaining Star Wars fans after TLJ
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - 330 million dollars of miserable CG wretchitude

TV
The Mandalorian - Decent-to-good first two seasons, big slide for the third
The Book of Boba Fett - Awful and character-ruining
Obi-Wan Kenobi - Haven't watched, appears to be awful and character-ruining
Andor - Excellent
Willow - Haven't watched, appears to be a joke

Animated (mostly kid stuff)
Lego Star Wars (various)
Star Wars Rebels
Star Wars Resistance
Star Wars The Bad Batch
Star Wars Visions
Tales of the Jedi
Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures


TLJ performed well off the back of Force Awakens but permanently tarnished the franchise among fans, Solo subsequently bombed, The Rise of Skywalker underperformed heavily and was disliked by fans, and Dial of Destiny looks to be the biggest bomb yet. That's a hell of a winning streak for Disney Lucasfilm.

Does Kathleen Kennedy have unlimited juice at the top of Lucasfilm? Given the trajectory since TLJ, it should be past time for a leadership change, but it's unclear that this will happen any time soon. How would you fix Star Wars and Lucasfilm if given the reins tomorrow?
Quite an eloquent way to say "some middle aged white broad ruined all the fun for everyone, per usual"

PNjAtPA.jpg
 

Grildon Tundy

Gold Member
I understand this point, but Star Wars was of a time and place, that being 1977. You can tell a promising young filmmaker to go wild in this universe but they'll still be in this universe, and hamstrung by it.

We've been living in boomer-world our whole lives, but the fact is, this stuff isn't forever. It has an end date. It's been kept around for longer than it maybe should have just because boomers have been so dominant in culture for so long, but that is fading, and with it their cultural touchstones just like the cultural touchstones of the generations before them did.
You misunderstand my point: I want a new filmmaker to make a new universe--not Star Wars.
 

Werewolf Jones

Gold Member
The amount of people who were meant to make movies or write movies and had falling outs with this bitch is insane. The two cunts who bombed GoT, Patty Jenkins, Taika Waititi, Kevin Feige, Rian Johnson trilogy, Damon Lindelof.

Also for what it's worth I sort of like & respect The Last Jedi but that movie does so much wrong but it could all be fixed if it was a solo movie instead of being the middle movie for a trilogy that kills any plot threads moving forward.

EDIT: Phoebe Waller Bridge plays the robot that demands robot rights in Solo btw as well as being in the Dial of Destiny.
 
Last edited:

Roufianos

Member
The amount of people who were meant to make movies or write movies and had falling outs with this bitch is insane. The two cunts who bombed GoT, Patty Jenkins, Taika Waititi, Kevin Feige, Rian Johnson trilogy, Damon Lindelof.

Also for what it's worth I sort of like & respect The Last Jedi but that movie does so much wrong but it could all be fixed if it was a solo movie instead of being the middle movie for a trilogy that kills any plot threads moving forward.

EDIT: Phoebe Waller Bridge plays the robot that demands robot rights in Solo btw as well as being in the Dial of Destiny.
It's amazing. So few films have actually been released, and even a couple of the ones that were had major staff changes and reshoots.
 

FunkMiller

Gold Member
Kennedy and Lucasfilm's biggest problem is that they are fucking lazy.

Nothing wrong with wanting more female protagonists in your movies, but make NEW MOVIES FOR THEM.

Just taking an existing and popular (predominantly male skewing) franchise and dropping your strong female protagonist in it, is fucking lazy, cynical and bound to end in failure. Dudes want to watch dudes in action and adventure movies. Pretending anything otherwise is just idiotic.

Make the effort to create interesting new stories with your female characters. Do some actual fucking work yourself, instead of falling back on the work of other people.

Every single film or TV show that's tried this formula has failed, and it isn't the audiences fault. I don't want to watch a sad old man running around behind a young woman. I want to watch a young man running around in front of everyone else.

And women want to watch the opposite. In movies that appeal to them. Make more of those, you lazy fucking assholes.
 
Last edited:

Days like these...

Have a Blessed Day
Kennedy and Lucasfilm's biggest problem is that they are fucking lazy.

Nothing wrong with wanting more female protagonists in your movies, but make NEW MOVIES FOR THEM.

Just taking an existing and popular (predominantly male skewing) franchise and dropping your strong female protagonist in it, is fucking lazy, cynical and bound to end in failure. Dudes want to watch dudes in action and adventure movies. Pretending anything otherwise is just idiotic.

Make the effort to create interesting new stories with your female characters. Do some actual fucking work yourself, instead of falling back on the work of other people.

Every single film or TV show that's tried this formula has failed, and it isn't the audiences fault. I don't want to watch a sad old man running around behind a young woman. I want to watch a young man running around in front of everyone else.

And women want to watch the opposite. In movies that appeal to them. Make more of those, you lazy fucking assholes.
It's not even so much that the protagonist was a woman it's that she was a Mary Sue. No one complains about Ripley in The Alien franchise cause she was well written character.
 

dave_d

Member
I tried to grapple with how this could be possible so I tried to think about the movie from different angles to find some redeeming qualities, such as Luke and Yoda talking together. But that made me think about the movie, which plunged me into depression.

-Space horses galloping on ISDs as an attack force
-Magic glowing Disney animals that lead the path to safety
-The whole casino sequence
-Mary Poppins Leia survives being in space, even though Carrie Fisher even died IRL
-Luke dies from concentrating too hard on the Force
-Adam Driver's villain is such a lame idiot I forget what his name even is
-Rebellion female leader is purple-haired because that's rebellious
-Space bombers that use gravity to drop bombs like B-52s

No matter what happens to this franchise, it will forever be tarnished with the embarrassment that this movie is in it.

The problem I had with the space bomber scene was that Leia signed off on it when Poe went out to do it but then started second guessing him when an actual target showed up. If they had done ANYTHING later in the movie to show she was actually right it could have worked. (Instead he basically got demoted because he didn't blindly follow orders after he present a plan and she was ok with said plan.) Also the purple-haired leader was never shown to even be competent.(She literally leads the enemy to the new base) I know the narrative was supposed to be how great Leia and Holdo were but they had to use scenes in the movie to actually show us that.(Which they didn't) As for Luke, I didn't have a problem with them basically turning him into Yoda. It's just they should have cut out the casino sequence, which was a complete waste of time, and used the extra time to put in scenes of Luke trying to rebuild the jedi order. (And failing which is how he basically turns into Yoda.)
 

Uhtred

Member
After the Indiana Jones debacle, Igor really needs to look at letter her go or her resigning. The damage she has done will take a decade to fix.
 
Last edited:

Fake

Member
Her contract expires in 2024. I'm guessing Disney will move on at that point.

Hope so, because would be fucking insane renewal a contract with someone that give you so much money loss... or we gonna start suspect this trend of 'not removing the person who waste your money'.
 
The fun part of this is that Disney only has like 9b cash on hand, and has to pay 9b for a down payment of their 27.5b aquisition of Hulu in 2024. They are in an extremely bad place, even if they have multiple successes. Amusingly, people have soured on live action remakes, star wars ip self immolation, and capeshit.

I cant wait till Disney finally dies, and will throw a little celebration when the devil mouse is no more.

edit: had wrong numbers, fixed them, death to disney
 
Last edited:

diffusionx

Gold Member
It wouldnt be bad, could be great. But the next generation isnt offering anything better. It's utter garbage.

and prior generations said the same thing about boomer shit. In a way, that's how it goes, pop culture mass market stuff is marketed to teenagers and young people not 40 year olds so yea at some point it's time to disconnect from this stuff and let the kiddos make stuff for themselves.
 

Days like these...

Have a Blessed Day
and prior generations said the same thing about boomer shit. In a way, that's how it goes, pop culture mass market stuff is marketed to teenagers and young people not 40 year olds so yea at some point it's time to disconnect from this stuff and let the kiddos make stuff for themselves.
My brother in Christ what even are you saying? The sequels sucked.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I think 10 years is too long for one studio head. Especially after how divisive some of these movies and tv shows turned out to be.

They definitely need new blood. I think her biggest mistake was letting Rian do whatever the fuck he wanted to do, and I say that as someone who loved WB's director first approach with DC. Star Wars isnt DC. Snyder fucking over Batman in BVS doesnt mean Batman is tarnished forever. However, Rian killing off Han Solo and Luke is something that will stay there forever. I actually liked TLJ up until the ending when Luke wifi'ed into a boss fight with kylo ren and then died when his internet got disconnected. It's a well made film otherwise, but its not a star wars movie.

Mando brought me back but too many shitty tv shows from Kathleen have once again tarnished the brand. They need to focus on a few things and just leave this streaming nonsense behind. Go back to Lucas and have him be the producer/creative lead. Have other guys direct and write HIS vision. If it sucks, and i think the 3 prequels sucked, then it sucks but at least it will be true star wars and not some fan fiction version of what JJ and Rian came up with.

I know George is done with Star Wars, but they need to find a way to bring him back. Kathleen Kennedy is a good producer but its time for her to step away from established franchises.
 

gothmog

Gold Member
Star Wars has always been kinda suspect as far as quality. What shielded it earlier was how little content there was, so it seemed like a deeper world as people just imagined who people like Boba Fett were. Now we know the universe is not as good as our imaginations were and we are disappointed. I doubt any creator is going to fix that. Lucas basically made the prequels start as a kids movie so that whole trilogy is poisoned. The sequels were just a mess that nobody wanted to own because the smart ones knew it was a trap and stayed away.

Rogue One and Andor show that you can still tell compelling stories in the universe. Move on from the legacy characters you ruined and make us care about something other than the Sith/Jedi conflict.
 

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Star Wars has always been kinda suspect as far as quality. What shielded it earlier was how little content there was, so it seemed like a deeper world as people just imagined who people like Boba Fett were. Now we know the universe is not as good as our imaginations were and we are disappointed.
Millions of people got into the EU books too, and the LucasArts games. Those did a good job of maintaining interest in the IP and building out the canon.

Which KK of course threw in the garbage.
 

gothmog

Gold Member
Millions of people got into the EU books too, and the LucasArts games. Those did a good job of maintaining interest in the IP and building out the canon.

Which KK of course threw in the garbage.
Yeah I don't know what the issue is with that. Lucas wasn't even that interested in the EU. Probably some kind of creative differences or control thing.
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Create new things. Leave all the old ip alone. You're not going to make it better. Especially since their idea of making things better all boils down to more diverse casting and making male characters less "problematic" and weak.
I don't care about star wars but came to agree with this. The fact that a great portion of media franchises that are popular today came from the 20th century is wild. All good things eventually come to an end, the only way for movies to get better is to get over the obsession with nostalgia and create new IP for the future gens to be nostalgic over
 
Last edited:

mitch1971

Member
but it’s almost as if she has purposefully done damage to beloved IP’s just to fuck with Lucas and Spielberg.
I watched a video the other day and there was a recording of Spielberg talking about when they were making the Indiana Jones films and Kennedy would come into the meeting, supposedly to take notes (which she evidently wasn't good at) and while spielberg and co were discussing the story - throwing around ideas - she'd interupt and come up with stuff like, 'Instead of Indiana Jones getting the 'girl' why not let him get a dog instead.'
 
Last edited:

Kacho

Member
Is just weird seeing KK and Lucas Films chase a new audience while simultaneously alienating their existing fans in the process. At what point does Disney leadership see the damage being done to these IP and make a change?
 
Top Bottom