Introduction
On March 10, Disney CEO Bob Chapek held a shareholder meeting. It was the first shareholder meeting after Lucasfilm fired actress Gina Carano from The Mandalorian for making "abhorrent" political statements on social media. Her firing drew a lot of backlash from the fanbase to the point that shareholders directly asked Chapek regarding the company's political biases and Kathleen Kennedy's questionable leadership.
Anyone who has been watching Disney and Lucasfilm closely should not be surprised at Chapek's non-answers, but it casts a very ominous cloud over Star Wars' future. The Disney trilogy was underwhelming. Heck, I think The Force Awakens was never good; it merely benefited from The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker being total trainwrecks. The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars are both very good (thanks to Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni). Rogue One was an okay film. But High Republic is completely uninspiring. Any video about the new show is heavily ratio'ed. Chapek's insistence to maintain the status quo will only prolong the Star War IP's stagnancy.
I highly recommend watching Literature Devil's thesis on how bad Rey is as a character.
Gina Carano's Firing
Disney unceremoniously fired the actress for Cara Dune under the pretense of making "abhorrent" political statements on Twitter and Instagram. However, upon further inspection, I found Gina Carano's statements to have actual merit. In addition, as pointed out as one of the shareholders, actor Pedro Pascal has also made hot political statements online, but Disney and Lucasfilm did nothing.
The backlash was so immense that Gina Carano shot up to #1 on IMDB (she has since fallen to #74). It gained attention from comedian Bill Burr and show host Bill Maher, who heavily criticized Disney for how it handled the situation. And when the Oscars YouTube channel uploaded Kathleen Kennedy's video, it was inundated with negative comments and the dislikes outnumbered the likes by a factor of 100 to 1. It got so bad that the channel disabled the comments and removed the like/dislike ratio. Ah, speaking of which...
Kathleen Kennedy: An Ineffectual Leader
When looking at Kathleen Kennedy's resume at first glance, it looks incredibly impressive and it is. For instance, she was the executive producer for the Back to the Future series, and the producer for E.T. and Jurassic Park. But that's the thing. The roles she played throughout her career were as executive producer or producer. As YouTube channel WorldClassBullshitters pointed out, the role of the executive producer is more on the managerial, technical, and financial side than the creative side.
The same applies to the role of producer. Some of the main roles of the producer is to manage the budget, take charge of pre-production and production, and set up marketing campaigns. In contrast, the director is the more creative role.
While malcontent over Kennedy's management grew, fans did enjoy Clone Wars and The Mandalorian, produced by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. In fact, because their works were very well received, a shareholder asked Chapek if Kennedy would be fired in favor of Filoni. Of course, the Disney CEO gave a generic non-answer before quickly moving onto the next question.
Now, this is not to say because Kennedy has only been an executive producer and producer throughout her career, her creativity is guaranteed to suck. However, when she has not had any experience working in more creativity-focused roles like with Favreau and Filoni, it is not surprising when the Disney trilogy came out the way it did. High Republic isn't exactly getting much positive feedback, either...
High Republic, Low Creativity
The reception towards High Republic's reveal was lukewarm. Currently, the ratio of likes to dislikes is nearly even. What really took the cake, though, was this:
Never mind the Han Solo derivative and his ship literally named The Vessel, but... a rock? Even worse, the rock is named Geode. Hmm... I wonder why the name sounds so familiar... Ah!
Geode, meet Geodude. Geodude, Geode.
I don't believe I need to say anymore about this.
Closing Thoughts
Whether Kathleen Kennedy and Bob Chapek need to be removed or whether they have the capacity to do a better job, one thing is absolutely certain: if Disney and Lucasfilm keeps going like this, Star Wars will continue to stagnate or even decline. You can say so-and-so did not fit the company's "universal values", but when those values were never elaborated upon and that same company produced a movie at Uighur concentration camps, it's hard to believe that that is the company's true philosophy. When the leader of Lucasfilm keeps being tone-deaf while others have proven their creative worth, there absolutely needs to be a shakeup.
