Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has renewed her contract as head of the Disney division for another three years.
Although there is no official word from Lucasfilm parent company Disney, the news is coming from former Hollywood Reporter writer Matt Belloni in an essay for the recently launched Puck entertainment business media outlet.
Word of her contract renewal comes on the heels of news that the next Star Wars film, director Patty Jenkins’s Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, was going to be delayed by a year. At the time of the anouncement last week, Lucasfilm stated that it was due to scheduling issues. Belloni reports that it was more Jenkins unable to agree on a final script with executives. He also states that similar creative differences obstacles are what led to planned trilogies of films from Game Of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dane Weiss and The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson to stall out.
But despite some announced projects not coming to fruitition, Kennedy has overseen the franchise’s sequel trilogy, which has brought in nearly $4.5 billion at the worldwide box office as well as the launch of the popular Mandalorian series on Disney+.
Kennedy was selected to by George Lucas to become a co-chair of the company. In retrospect, this was a move that signaled Lucaswas getting ready to sell the company, as he did just that the following October to Disney. As part of the sale, Kennedy was named president of the company.
The news may come as a bit of a bitter surprise to anyone who primarily gets their genre entertainment news from a certain breed of YouTube channel and clickbait site. For them, Kennedy has been a rallying point for a number of complaints aboutthe franchise,most of which are complete fabrications, outright distortions or projections of tehir own insecurities. Since at least 2017, Kennedy has been pilloried in these spaces, with these alleged “journalists” claiming “insider information” that Kennedy was going to be fired from the company “any day now” going back at least as far late 2017.
