Talking About 'Star Wars': Why would Disney trust Kathleen Kennedy after the way the recent Star Wars movies were received?

-

Someone on Quora asks:

Why would Disney trust Kathleen Kennedy after the way the recent Star Wars movies were received?

 My reply:
Well, it would be most ungracious if Bob Iger and Alan Horn fire Kathleen Kennedy after producing three of four financially successful films in a series that its creator, George Lucas, had once declared would consist only of the six “Tragedy of Darth Vader” Episodes (and, later, those six films plus the Star Wars: The Clone Wars series).
As of this writing, the first two installments of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi) have earned $$3.4 billion worldwide. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, earned $1.056 billion. The only underperformer in the new post-George Lucas “era of Disney” Lucasfilm slate of movies in the Star Wars franchise is Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made “only” $392 million.
Solo’s box office flop was a given, at least in hindsight, considering that it followed the release of The Last Jedi by a timespan of five months. It was also hampered by the studio’s poor choice in hiring Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, their subsequent firing, and the replacement of the directing duo with Ron Howard. And, to add more obstacles to the film’s success at the box office, it was scheduled close to the release of another major Disney-owned studio’s highly anticipated Avengers movie.
Since December of 2015, Lucasfilm has released four Star Wars films, and only one really failed to be a blockbuster.
So much for your premise of “the way the recent Star Wars movies were received.”
I find this question to be rather insulting since Kathleen Kennedy has been in the film business since the 1980s and is responsible for producing some of the most successful movies in American pop culture history. It reflects a sexist, small-minded belief that she is solely responsible for the supposed decline of Star Wars as a franchise, which is a fantasy created and disseminated by a small but very vocal minority of persons who call themselves “true Star Wars fans.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more