Rumored New Star Wars Boss Suggests a Fanboy Future for the Franchise

Lucasfilm, the film and television company behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones, is reportedly set to get new leadership. Kathleen Kennedy, longtime president of Lucasfilm who has stewarded Star Wars since 2012, is stepping down and will be replaced by a pair of co-presidents. One of them is going to be Dave Filoni—which suggests that the future of the franchise is going to lean even more into a certain type of story, for better or worse. 

A new report from Puck News states that Filoni and Lynwen Brennan will become co-presidents of Lucasfilm when Kennedy steps down later this month. Filoni will reportedly head the creative side of things while Brennan will tackle business. Filoni's name should be very familiar to fans of the animated Clone Wars series and several recent Star Wars titles like Ahsoka and the upcoming film The Mandalorian and Grogu. He currently serves as the chief creative officer of Lucasfilm. 

Filoni became involved in Star Wars starting with the animated Clone Wars TV series, which premiered back in 2008 and ran until 2014 with an additional final season in 2020. The show, which was set between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, greatly expanded Star Wars lore and introduced characters who have become major players in the franchise, like Ahsoka, Anakin Skywalker's padawan-turned-Jedi outcast. He also created Star Wars Rebels, another series which features plenty of characters who have since turned up in live-action shows, like the Disney+ series Ahsoka. 

Dave Filoni's Ascent Suggests That Star Wars Won't Move Forward 

It's fair to say that nobody has shaped current-day Star Wars fandom more than Filoni. A generation of fans grew up watching Cone Wars and Rebels, and for many of them, characters like Ahsoka or Ezra Bridger are as iconic as Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. The animated shows are largely good. 

The potential downside is that Filoni is, perhaps understandably, very enamored with his own creations and his own version of Star Wars. There hasn't been a theatrical Star Wars movie since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. In the meantime, there have been a few Disney+ TV shows. With exceptions like The Acolyte and Andor, many of them have been heavily connected to Filoni's TV shows.

In order to understand Ahsoka, audiences essentially needed to be deeply familiar with not just Clone Wars, the show she originated on, but also Rebels, as characters from both series drove the narrative. The Mandalorian, once a standalone series, has also become increasingly entwined with Filoni's creations. The next Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, was co-written by Filoni, and there is another movie in the works that will tie together several of his shows.

For fans of Clone Wars and Rebels, this is great news. However, Star Wars has struggled to find a future for itself. The Rise of Skywalker was essentially a narrative dead-end, and Star Wars has so far struggled to tell a story set in the franchise's future. (A movie about Daisy Ridley's Rey is in development and 2027's Star Wars: Starfighter will also be set after the events of Episode IX.) Most of the Star Wars titles have been set between other installments and mine the past—specifically things Filoni helped create—rather than do something truly new. 

It's a type of storytelling that rewards die-hard fans at perhaps the exclusion of casual fans who want to see a fun space adventure rather than the long-awaited sequel to a cartoon with nearly 60 hours worth of episodes. It's likely that Filoni will greenlight Star Wars projects that aren't just riffing on Clone Wars or Rebels (and indeed a few of the titles that are already in production appear to be relatively fresh ideas). At the same time, having Filoni in charge of the whole franchise suggests that the galaxy far, far away is going to be getting at least a bit more of the same.