Dave Filoni Won’t Let His Characters Die… and It’s Killing Star Wars

Has Dave Filoni taken Star Wars larping too far? Perhaps he’s mirroring Anakin’s story a bit too much…

The following article is by Tommy Tables, a VIPro Member

Disclaimer: I am making heavy use of a number of Star Wars metaphors throughout this article, so buckle up cause this thing is being run straight into the ground with no brakes.

Lucasfilm’s Dave Filoni is an incredibly imaginative creator who has pretty much everything going for him at the moment: a former protégé of George Lucas, he has a successful set of TV shows under his belt and is now set to lead both a new live-action tv show AND a movie set in the Star Wars universe, with the full support and blessing of his patron saints at Lucasfilm. He is also becoming a cautionary tale.

Wait what?

For those of you who don’t know, Dave Filoni is arguably the highest-profile creative at Lucasfilm at the moment. He first came onto the scene in 2006 after being hand-picked by Lucas himself to produce the Clone Wars animated movie. This was back in the “good old days” when George was in charge. Before the dark times, before Disney.

Filoni would, under Lucas’s watchful eye, follow-up with the very successful Clone Wars CG tv series, which ran for 7 seasons and was so well-received that some felt it “saved” the Prequels by fleshing out crucial backstory and character development that the films themselves had skipped. What’s more, Clone Wars was the vehicle through which Dave was able to insert his own handmade characters into the Star Wars lore, not least of which was Ahsoka Tano – the heretofore unheard of Jedi apprentice to Anakin Skywalker himself. After Clone Wars wound down and Lucas rode off into the sunset on a horse made of money and Disney stock, Filoni would persevere at the new Disney Lucasfilm under President Kathleen Kennedy and go on to helm the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon series, which featured a slew of new characters he created such as Sabine, Hera, Ezra and Kanan. It met with moderate success, running for 4 seasons until it concluded in 2018.

Then things got murky.

With Rebels concluded, Filoni was once again tapped for a new show called Star Wars: Resistance. Ostensibly, it was to “fix” the Sequel trilogy in the same way Clone Wars did for the Prequels, but it didn’t go so well and was cancelled after only 2 seasons. Some blamed the forgettable characters, others the poor CGI. Still others felt that the Sequels were so universally disliked that no amount of lipstick could be applied to that particular pig (creatives of the new Rey movie, take note…). Filoni then seemingly went back to his roots by working on the Clone-themed “Bad Batch” and “Tales of the Jedi” shows (featuring Ahsoka…again), which are both currently airing.

Somewhere around 2018 and 2019, Filoni got involved with the live-action tv series “The Mandalorian”, a pet project created by the founder of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, John Favreau. It was meant to be its own small thing off in an unused corner of that galaxy far, far away. Suffice to say, however, the show did gangbusters and became the most universally popular product Disney Lucasfilm ever released, singlehandedly propelling the Disney+ streaming service to new heights as its flagship show.

Filoni was credited as an “executive producer” on Mando, and has obviously been there since the beginning, as he directed the very first episode of the series. Yet it was clear to everyone that the show and the entire “Mandoverse” itself were entirely Jon Favreau’s babies. With the unprecedented success of Mando and the subsequent failure of almost everything else Star Wars related, it was around this time that the rumors of a Lucasfilm civil war started gaining traction, with many speculating that Favreau was vying for the top job at Lucasfilm. Filoni was seen as Favreau’s right-hand man: the Anakin to Favreau’s Obi-Wan. In fact, it was the “World Between Worlds”, a creation of Filoni’s in Rebels, which became the flashpoint around which many fans desperately clung on to as a possible means to erase the Sequel Trilogy altogether. By all accounts, Dave Filoni was the real-life embodiment of the “Chosen One” – a disciple of St.Lucas, survivor of the Disney takeover, and the shining star of Lucasfilm working hand-in-hand with his patron Favreau to save the Star Wars franchise from the clutches of Emperor Kennedy and her ilk.

But, like Anakin, it seems as though Filoni cannot let go of his personal attachments – in this case, his own characters. And that may be leading to his undoing.

By all accounts, Ahsoka Tano should have died at the end of the Clone Wars. In fact, George Lucas himself wanted her un-alived. But Dave did everything he could to protect her, including having her leave the Jedi Order and show up in the Rebels tv series afterwards. Again, Ahsoka should have rightly died then and there during her duel with her former master, Darth Vader. But Dave just couldn’t let her go! J.J. Abrams went so far as to include her voice at the end of Rise of Skywalker, implying that she had finally croaked and joined the other Force ghosts. In response, Dave tweeted out pic related (see attached), implying that she still somehow survived even that! It was starting to get ridiculous.

After the wild success of the first season of Mandalorian, it stood to reason it was only a matter of time before she showed up, and so she did in the second season, played for the first time in live-action by Rosario Dawson. While her appearance was well-received, it opened up a huge can of worms and led to some uncomfortable questions from the fandom, such as “Where was she in the Original Trilogy?” “Why didn’t she challenge Darth Vader again if she was still alive?” and “Why did she let Luke deal with everything on his own?” While not as bad as the Holdo Maneuver, it still damaged the Original Trilogy canon more than it should have, and fans started to realize that maybe Filoni was getting a bit too obsessive with his love of his characters.

Meanwhile, in a shocking turnabout, Jon Favreau’s ascendant star had taken a sharp nosedive. After doing the impossible and re-uniting the Star Wars fanbase through an exceptional Luke Skywalker cameo at the end of the second season, Lucasfilm took all that goodwill and stomped it into the ground through the sudden firing of Gina Carano, a lynchpin in Favreau’s Mandoverse. This act, speculated to have been done pushed for by Kennedy herself, fatally derailed all of Favreau’s future plans. The Book of Boba Fett was released a year later and was awful in just about every definition of the word, with many people wondering if it had been written by an AI that had been dropped on its head a few times. It also completely undid the entire story arcs of both the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda off-screen of their own show. People couldn’t understand what had happened, and the show’s disjointed failure was laid squarely at Favreau’s feet. Then Mando season 3 came out, and the picture started to clear up. Suddenly Lucasfilm reps were going on record as saying the Mandalorian could “refer to anyone” and Mando himself became a background character in his own show to Bo-Katan Kryze, a character who proceeded to upstage him more times than I could count, got the Darksaber from him in the most contrived way possible (only to get it destroyed a few episodes later), united the Mandalorian peoples and was exempt from the rule of not being able to take her helmet off for a breather.

Oh, did I mention that Bo-Katan was created by Dave Filoni in the Clone Wars? Funny that.

While new episode of the Mandalorian Season 3 were streaming every week and Disney+ subscriptions were dropping like flies, Filoni himself started making some weird plays. Out of nowhere, he referred to The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson as a true friend and mentor, gushing about him with effusive praise (while pointedly ignoring the fact that the man had basically fractured the fandom). Bizarrely, Filoni doubled-down afterwards and sang glowing praises of Kathleen Kennedy herself, discussing how she had helped guide him as a creator and director, and crediting her with the success of his efforts in live-action Star Wars.

Fans were taken aback. Wasn’t Filoni firmly in the Favreau camp? And why were both Filoni and Kennedy going out of their way at the recent Star Wars Celebration event to avoid any mention of Favreau, who seemed to be persona non grata?

It was clear at Celebration that Kathleen Kennedy and her team had suddenly become ascendant again: A new movie trilogy announced! The return of Rey! The Acolyte actually being real! Young Jedi Adventures!

And Filoni was in the thick of it. People noticed that Kathleen Kennedy could. not. stop. namedropping him practically the entire time. Then, the other shoe dropped. Kennedy revealed to all that it would be Filoni, not Favreau, who would helm the live-action movie that would wrap up the Mandoverse in a nice little bow. You could almost hear her saying “My new apprentice, Darth Filoni, will take care of you all”. Adding further insult to injury, Filoni later confirmed that his movie would be called “Heir to the Empire” and feature Grand Admiral Thrawn as its villain. Yet instead of Luke being the central focus of the film (as he was in the beloved book series of the same name by Timothy Zahn), it would be…..guess who? Ahsoka. Tano.

So what can we infer here? Obviously that, if there had indeed been a Lucasfilm civil war going on, it had ended and Dave Filoni had obviously switched sides. From the outside, it looks very much as though Filoni was lured over to Kennedy’s camp in order to gain the “power to save the ones he loved from (literary) death”. And it worked. Bo-Katan effectively replaced Dinn Djarin in his own show and now, instead of Luke Skywalker, it will be Ahsoka who will be the central focus of the most beloved Expanded Universe series of all time, with Sabine and Hera effectively replacing Han and Leia to boot. All of Filoni’s personal creations have risen to a level of prominence never before seen, effectively supplanting every other character in their wake.

And poor Favreau. All he wanted to do was make good Star Wars. Instead his creations got hijacked, his own characters reduced to bit players, and his power usurped by Filoni (suddenly, Favreau was reporting to him) while simultaneously being thrown under the bus for the disastrous Book of Boba Fett and Mando season 3 (if you liked them good for you, but at least 300,000 people who cancelled their Disney+ subs last quarter did not). It’s no wonder he had his self-insert character Paz Vizla killed off by the Sequel trilogy’s Praetorian Guards this season, in an obvious message to fans that he was done.

But there is still a New Hope. The wind is a-shifting, and maybe Filoni should have watched Return of the Jedi to refresh his memory because fans have caught on to him now. Whereas before, he was generally spoken of with praise, you can see the shift in social media now veering negative against him. People are realizing that maybe Filoni isn’t all he’s cracked up to be, and that maybe he’s the reason that Star Wars is starting to suck again.

Then there’s the matter of Kathleen Kennedy herself, the Lucasfilm Emperor who has managed to “cheat death” by clutching tightly to the reigns of power for almost a decade, but who may not be there for much longer.

Why, you ask?

Because Kathleen Kennedy has just had a very, very bad week.

Out of the blue, Disney suddenly announced that its premiere Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel and larping experience was to be shut down, less than a year into its very expensive opening.

And not just that, but the news of its ignominious closing was literally timed to coincide with Kennedy entering the theatre at Cannes for the world premiere Indian Jones 5 and the Dial of Destiny. The movie which was her passion project and her last, best hope at salvaging her legacy.

The same movie that was so laden with expensive reshoots and de-aging CGI that it likely needs to make $1 billion in order to turn a profit.

The same movie that was described as “boring” and received a lukewarm response at Cannes after its premiere.

The same movie that is now being eviscerated by what are usually Disney’s friendliest movie critics and publications.

Oh and by the way, her Willow tv series will also be shortly pulled from Disney+ as a tax write-off, four months after it had just aired.

For those keeping track, over the span of 48 hours, all three of Lucasfilm’s major franchises received the corporate version of a suplex, one after the other. And sitting at the center of it all was Bob Iger, who, after 23+ years decided for the first time ever to attend Cannes this year, keeping himself distanced from Kennedy, Ford and the rest but still being there in person to see Kennedy get hit with this triple-whammy of bad news. Even her most obtuse, fervent supporters cannot deny that Kennedy now seems to have been purposefully humiliated by her peers, her media allies and by her very own company. It might not seem like much to you or I, but it was cataclysmic in the circles that our betters run in, of that there is no doubt. Picture the end of Return of Jedi, where the Emperor is at the height of his power and about to crush the Rebellion once and for all, when suddenly out of nowhere he’s hoisted by Vader and is about to be tossed down a reactor shaft. Pause there. Now swap Vader out with Iger and you’ll see where I’m going with this (I know, I know. It should be Filoni to make the battered metaphor work, but just go with it please.).

And yes, we’ve been here before. We have danced the “Kennedy is leaving, this time for reals” dance more times than I can count. Yet at no point since 2014 has she been attacked this viciously and embarrassed so publicly. It seems that Iger and Disney may have finally realized that they cannot afford her anymore, especially if Indiana Jones ends up losing money.

So if Kennedy is indeed being aimed towards that reactor shaft, then where does that leave Dave Filoni? After so visibly aligning himself with Kennedy and her camp, what will happen to him when she is gone and heads start to roll in earnest at Lucasfilm? It’s hard to say, and will depend very much on how well the Ahsoka TV series does. But what we do know with some certainty is that at some point very recently, Filoni was presented with the same choice the Emperor gave to Anakin in Episode 3, and, just like Anakin, he chose poorly. It’s now looking like he may have stabbed Favreau in the back to elevate himself and his beloved characters to the very heights of the franchise. If indeed so, he did it just in time to get front row seats on the Death Star as it’s about to be blown to smithereens.

Time will tell. But I mean, come on, he should have known better! If anyone should know this story and how it plays out, it’s Filoni of all people.

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