Like how the fuck is Kathleen Kennedy still employed? She's the reverse Midas, turning money-printing machines into dust overnight.
I don't think you can have a track record like that and be bad. There's something else going on.
This is a post about Pixar, and you're calling for Kathleen Kennedy (who has nothing to do with Pixar) to be fired? You may not like them, but the Star Wars projects she produced made a ton of money. The layoffs aren't because of her.
Producers don't write or direct. They produce. And her Star Wars movies, even though not creatively great, made a ton of money – way more than Disney put in. She did her part of the job.
(And the reason the money argument is relevant here is because OP brought her up out of nowhere on a thread about layoffs at a separate entity)
That resume falls off a lot towards the end. Quoting Abe Simpson,
> I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it anymore and what's it seems weird and scary. It'll happen to you!
As financial advisors say, past returns are no good predictors for future performance
She's not great, but mark my words, firing her will not improve the quality of Star Wars content. Star Wars itself is stretched out.
A really, really big pony.
Disney's biggest opportunity of the last...forever? (Tied with Marvel)
And an opportunity that was squandered more than it needed to be.
The franchise just can't keep reinventing itself to target every demographic. They need to cater to existing fans.
Making a thing into a different thing, unsurprisingly, alienates the people that pay you money for the first thing.
That doesn't mean that these IPs (and their fandoms) can't evolve, but you need to tell good stories that respect the universe they are set in.
To emphasize this point: There are literally 350+ Star Wars Legends books [1].
And that's not including film novelizations, comics, or individual short stories.
[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Legends_books
My understanding is this universe began as fan fiction and these trailers about an MMO are probably the most interesting Star Wars films since first two trilogies.
Betrayed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWFzfQs7vmk
Sacrifice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bmsNa9GOR0
Deceived: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGDBTDnW7d0
The MMO is over ten years old, but the trailers are so celebrated that they re-released them in 4K two years ago. In a matter of minutes, they all manage to tell a better story, with more compelling characters and dialogue, than anything Disney has put out.
You definitely don't mean Europe so I guess that is just code for China? It is true these days that movies have to do well in the world's second biggest market, but there is a lot of box office skim combined with fraud and low ticket prices that don't make the market that lucrative.
I live in Vietnam. Population 100 million. More than any country in Europe. It is not popular here. Or anywhere in Southeast Asia -- population 660 million -- from what I can tell.
I mean, it is popular in the way any big budget, CGI spectacular is popular. But it's not this big cultural thing it is in the US or Europe. Nobody cares in the slightest what the next Star Wars movie will be about or how the IP is doing. They think of Rogue One in the same way they think of Train to Busan. A fun enough foreign movie they watched that one time a few years ago.
The vast majority of my friends and family have never seen any of the original trilogy or even most of the prequels. They definitely aren't watching any of the Disney+ series, since it says "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your region".
Of course nobody cares about how the IP is doing. That is for the corporation to worry about.
On the other hand people, individualy, will make up their mind about buying a ticket or not. There are many different things which go into that decision, but one of those is how much they enjoyed the earlier movies in the franchise.
Caring about the IP is the forest. And individuals making a decision to go to the cinema to watch the new star wars thing or doing literally anything else with their free time are the trees which make the forest.
My kid doesn't care about Star Wars nearly as much as I do, obviously - but the big thing about it are the memories from when I first watched it. It would be great to see a new Star Wars movie that can engage kids today in the same way it engaged us so many years ago.
Also, have in mind that a lot of old blockbuster movies can look silly today (Sound of Music is one I watched recently), but you have to appreciate them with the proper time period context.
Europeans are completely different. My German co-worker (well, when I was working in China) reminisced about the Original Battle Star Galactica, which was featured as a movie for his East German market. Star Wars of course, was popular, it helped that Lucas cast a lot of stars from the UK.
A lot of Asian pop movies and shows are exactly this. Child of Korean immigrants here, married to a Chinese wife. Lots of stupid fun that plays in one culture is just a non-sequitur in another.
It makes perfect sense. The only exposure China had to Star Wars when it came out, were bootleg comics where they drew the Star Destroyers as Space Battleship Yamato.
Disney is likely not focusing on Southeast Asia because, despite of the population, box office receipts and licensing deals must be fairly low in dollar terms. Most companies would rather be extremely successful in China, North America and Europe alone than be mildly successful everywhere, so content is optimized for these regions.
So you think Disney way overpaid?
She's not great, but mark my words, firing her will not improve the quality of Star Wars content.
The stupid Vespa scooter stuff in the Boba Fett series? Hers. Lots of the stupid stuff in Disney Star Wars is hers. The early Jedi stuff in the comics no one liked? Instigated by her.
Star Wars itself is stretched out.
Basically, KK put it on the rack!
George Lucas did many orders of magnitude more damage with the Phantom Menace and stretched out and trashed Star Wars with the prequel trilogy 15 years before Kathleen was even hired.
Nope. Dig into it. There's TONS of meddling she did that turned out to be cringe.
George Lucas did many orders of magnitude more damage with the Phantom Menace and stretched out and trashed Star Wars with the prequel trilogy 15 years before Kathleen was even hired.
This absolutely doesn't track with people wishing for the prequel days again. Yes, the prequels were disappointing, but still we didn't imagine how much worse it could be.
I think you reversed that.
I think they're about equal levels of bad. To be fair, the prequels are "stiffer" than the sequels. However, the bad writing of the sequels severely overall damages the lore, while the bad writing of the prequels somehow manages to overall improve it.
There's a whole rich universe of EU novels exploring a wide variety of stories. Timothy Zahn wrote an Ocean's Eleven heist story in "Scoundrels". Andor was universally praised, partly because it's doing something completely different. Even the currently ongoing High Republic books are pretty good and nothing like the movies. Star Wars is a whole science fiction galaxy, it's as big or small as a writer wants it to be.
So many great series ruined completely.
So, unpopular opinion, but most franchise-based books are trash.
I've read a lot of Star Wars EU stuff! I've read a lot of universally-acclaimed Star Wars EU stuff!
It's... not great writing and not great science fiction.
Sure, it's great plot, but that's because we already know and love the setting and stories. And "more" is enjoyable.
But I feel like holding the EU as a paragon of Star Wars salvation is overvaluing it.
Most of it would turn out just as poorly as the movies did, for the same reasons.
I can tell you it is exceedingly popular in Hungary. I have no reason to believe it is not similarly exceedingly popular elsewhere.
> Star Wars itself is stretched out.
It is now. Franchises need nurturing to remain valuable.
The biggest crime they commited is that they did not employ the same screenwriter for all 3 of the sequels. When you are making a trilogy, and you know that you are making a trilogy, you better write the complete arch as a consistent whole and then find the 3 separate sub arches in that.
Instead of that what we got is 2 different teams subverting each other’s ideas and basically messaging to each other. (And the message was that “your ideas are baaad”) It was as if watching someone build a sand castle, someone else comming along kicking it down starting to build a different one, and then the first person returning and kicking the second sandcastle down to build a third.
“Yes, and…” is not just the way to do good improv, but also the way to build good movies built on each other.
George Lucas was seen as a dictator who was just sucking in legacy money without doing any real work.
Now the owners are criticizing it for being overstretched.
The Mandalorian was good. I’ll never forget Werner Herzogs character defending the Empire: “on every possible metric life improved!”
I haven’t seen Andor, but it got great reviews.
Star Wars seems in a good place.
You're minimising her reach and impact on the industry, for better or worse.
Dial of Destiny was her last film. As for Star Wars, it's huge across the anglosphere and even in countries where English isn't spoken. I've personally queued for hours in Japan to get tickets.
That Kathleen Kennedy is in the room for all the important decisions about Spielberg and Lucas' best films in the 80s and 90s is outside the scope of this insane idea that somehow firing her will fix Star Wars. Star Wars itself is the problem. It was underplayed in the early 90s, and is massively overplayed now.
And I should have been clearer about its global reach. Star Wars is not this hallowed franchise outside the anglosphere, and is actually not particularly popular in China.
I don't think it can be on any one person. The CGI in some of these latest marvel movies (looking at you, Multiverse of Madness and Wakanda Forever) looks about as good as what I see when I play my PS5 which isn't terrible, but it looks cheap and lacks physical weight you normally associate with strong acting. You don't get that kind of product without the entire pipeline fouling up and then getting pushed out overtime rather than going with delays + reshoots. Add on to this that, for instance, the creators of Multiverse of Madness weren't even aware of the plot of the Scarlet Witch and allegedly it went over the same ground as her TV show (not that I've seen it), so it seems a lot more like studio dysfunction. I've got to imagine the problem is much, much larger than just one producer—one who has been attached to some of the largest Spielberg movies of the 20th century like ET and Jurassic Park.
Anyway, I'd think Kevin Fiege is far more closely tied to the decision making that appears to be hurting them right now—occasionally princess or Pixar movies miss, but they've sunk a lot of money into MCU movies that were not popular among their own fanbase, mostly due to his planning and, as I understand it from loyal fans, a lack of beloved characters returning.
I have also done poor quality work before. It’s always managements fault for prioritizing speedy crap to meet some internal goal instead of prioritizing the end product.
Managers need to be judged on customer satisfaction not internal OKRs and metrics.
100% with you there—I meant to imply a pipeline failure was a management failure of some sort.
Elemental is one of the biggest whiplashes I've seen in animation. I didn't particularly care for it, but it may be like Turning Red where I simply wasn't the target audience. I don't want creatives to be punished for not trying to keep it safe and unoffensive to everyone.
I get not being in the audience for a film. I felt like that about all the Star Wars prequels, and I spent my pre-10s on the original trilogy. I couldn't tell you what is wrong about sequels, even if they were done well I probably wouldn't be in the audience for them anymore.
It isn't easy to make movies that kids like and want to watch but parents don't mind watching multiple times (because that's how kids do movies... multiple times)
Disney still does a pretty good job of that.
Either she matters or she doesn't, you can't only give her blame while denying credit for the same job.
What are you referring to? I just looked at the 5 Star Wars movies she has producer credits on, via Wikipedia, and not one of them demonstrates losses. The profits are in the billions and only one of the 5 movies, Solo, did less than a billion at the box office.
And why are you conveniently forgetting Jar Jar Binks and blaming someone else? Lucas was making trash long before Disney got involved. I thought Force Awakens was better done than most of the franchise up to that point.