Kathleen Kennedy has been involved with two very well reviewed and financially successful Star Wars movies, and she was a big part of why they were successful. She recognizes what it takes to make a great movie because she has been involved with many great directors on many great movies.
She hasn’t been involved with any good Star Wars movies. She has been involved with financially successful Star Wars movies, sure. But that’s not relevant to anyone unless you are a Disney shareholder or somehow made money off the movie yourself. If we’re just talking about the quality of the movies and what they will mean to people in a few years time, they are junk.
It’s a business. Movies need to make money.
That’s true, and I agree with you. They do need to make money. But being qualitatively good and being financially successful are not mutually exclusive things in the movie business.
This wasn’t just their movie. Lawrence Kasdan wrote it and he and Kathleen Kennedy had a specific idea of what they wanted. Rian Johnson wrote and directed VIII. That is his movie.
As I said, I agree with Kathleen Kennedy and Lawrence Kasdan. These directors were not a good fit for this movie. But that could have and should have been figured out a long time ago. The studio should fire a director who is arrested and charged by police or comes out as a racist or does something else crazy that would bring tremendously negative PR to the studio and tarnish its image. The studio has an obligation to step in and fire a director if that person starts showing up to work drunk all the time, or is believed to have sexually harassed the cast or crew, or is using drugs on the set. If the studio is getting the dailies and determines the quality of the work is unprofessional, or not in line with what was previously agreed to in pre-production, then sure, the director may need to be replaced.
But I think it’s extraordinarily out of line to hijack the movie from the boardroom and then part ways in the middle of production over “creative differences”. The film is the directors’ film. The studio invests in the vision financially. They decide who to hire. But once the hiring is done, the movie is the director’s vision. That’s what they are hired to do. Certain parameters may be agreed to ahead of time, and certainly there are directors who go into a project knowing they have very little creative control, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here or these guys never would have quit, I’m guessing.
So even though I do agree with Kathleen Kennedy’s take on this, that these two were not right for this project, why didn’t she figure that out a long time ago? Why hire them in the first place? I find it disturbing the way it all went down.