It’s being played off as if Patty Jenkins was just too darn busy to make a Star Wars movie, and gosh darn it, they just didn’t realize it until now. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge that I’d like to sell you.
Patty Jenkins, the director of the Wonder Woman movies, is dropping Star Wars according to The Hollywood Reporter. You wouldn’t necessarily know that the way the media is reporting it. Rather than just stating the fact that Rogue Squadron — the Star Wars movie Jenkins was going to direct — is completely off Disney’s release calendar and no work is being done on it… they’re instead presenting the situation as if she’ll come back to it at some point.
Yeah, sure.
The problem with Jenkins returning to Star Wars is that this new shift in her calendar means Rogue Squadron can’t even go into production until around 2024. Are we really supposed to believe that she’s going to return to a movie that has been completely sacked from the calendar, restore or restart a writing team, and get this thing moving almost certainly with someone new at the helm of Lucasfilm?
My favorite thing, so far, is some of the access media and trades presenting her working on an unnamed Cleopatra film for Paramount as having been the thing that really just pushed her schedule too far. Seriously? Seriously? We’re talking about Star Wars, we’re talking about Kathleen Kennedy producing and Patty Jenkins directing, and the spin is going to be that a Cleopatra without even a title was just too important to push back.
What this really shows is that Kathleen Kennedy’s power is completely slipping from her control. I don’t think that’s a subjective statement at this point. Just think about it: Kathleen Kennedy had Rogue Squadron and The Acolyte as her big projects she was directly overseeing. Anything else that is big is under the control of Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. Now, Kathleen Kennedy has one single major project, and there’s no guarantee that it will manifest into something worthwhile. She’s truly relegated to just watching over Indiana Jones 5 at this point.
So then the question becomes, what’s going on with Kathleen Kennedy’s contract at Lucasfilm? Her previous contract allegedly expired, yet she’s still there. Did she get a private three-month extension? One year? It’s very hard to imagine, at this point, that she has much of a contract in place if she’s having films struck from the theatrical release calendar. And who made that call? That’s something I’m going to be trying to find out big time: who essentially cancelled Rogue Squadron?
Wherever that call came from, it’s a massive blow to any vestige of power that Kathleen Kennedy still held with Star Wars. And until she’s gone, it’s unlikely we will now see any Star Wars film on the big screen.
