There's been one topic I've had sitting on the backburner to write about for some time. It was never pressing, so I kept kicking it down the road. However, in light of the "Will she, won't she retire" news from last week, Kathleen Kennedy discussed how when Star Wars projects go through perfectly normal processes in the film industry, people scrutinize it as "troubled."
Speaking to Deadline, Kennedy said:
"It doesn’t matter if you’re doing Star Wars or anything else. What’s troubling and frustrating is that our development gets scrutinized, and I don’t know any other production company where their development gets scrutinized like that. It’s very hard for anything to happen within Star Wars without some aspect of it becoming public before you even want it to become public... not every single thing we put in development we going to make. That’s not unusual. We want to make those things that we feel are the best. We want to make those things that, as time passes, feel relevant to what the audience is responding to."
Star Wars is stuck up on a weird pedestal where everything it does is hyper analyzed because it's Star Wars. The latest example has been with the upcoming Rey Skywalker film that will see the return of Daisy Ridley and directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Recently, it picked up a new writer, George Nolfi, after Damon Lindelof, Justin Britt-Gibson, and Steven Knight left the pre-production for one reason or another. One peek at the internet, and it wasn't hard to see headlines like "Rey Movie is doomed! Kathleen Kennedy fails again!"
Whenever I see these kinds of reactions, you're telling me you don't a) understand how the film industry works or b) choosing to ignore it to farm clicks for your YouTube grift. Because a movie going through different writers is normal for any movie.
Joining a film is a major commitment, something that can be literal years of a person's life. To do a Star Wars, a creator would have to turn down other work. That's why Kennedy is very clear in the Deadline article that they haven't gotten Taika Waititi's movie yet. He's incredibly busy. She even joked that Tony Gilroy probably wasn't expecting to give a literal decade of his life to this franchise.
Stepping into a Star Wars project is a huge commitment, which is why when something is in pre-production, you'll see some people do a little bit before moving onto the next thing. Knight even commented recently that parts of what he worked on with the Rey Skywalker script will probably be in the movie. Yes, sometimes there are creative differences. There's a reason why Lord and Miller will (sadly) probably never have a Star Wars. But when pre-production processes are doing completely normal things?
Kennedy's right. We so rarely hear about other films doing the exact same thing as Star Wars, because it's just a normal part of the filmmaking process. Internet culture, and I would include us at Dork Side of the Force in this too as we are not innocent, has blown these things out of proportion. We all race to beat the almighty algorithm to get the most clicks so we can pay our bills. We generate drama out of normalcy for the views to spin more stories to keep the lights on.
As a writer, it sucks that this is my job sometimes. It's part of the game we journalists have to play. I hope the more that we say in articles that these things are normal will help spread the word that Star Wars is doing nothing out of the ordinary, and these creators can just do their thing like any other production out there.