The folks over at Lucasfilm have moved on from just being unprofessional and devious to fans, directors and actors. Now they’re going after showrunners.
Something is rotten at Lucasfilm. In-demand television producer Karyn McCarthy filed suit on March 7, 2023 against Blue Stockings, the production entity in charge of Kathleen Kennedy and Leslye Headland’s long-discussed Star Wars series The Acolyte.
The suit alleges that Lucasfilm courted Karyn McCarthy to be a producer in mid-2022 with full awareness that McCarthy was also in negotiations with the production team behind Apple’s Sugar starring Colin Farrell. According to filings, Apple offered McCarthy a lucrative deal that would have made her their highest paid producer at the streamer. It is well-documented that Apple has a voluminous war chest of funding to dabble in television, so McCarthy’s deal was most likely very high dollar.
While most figures are redacted from the filing, the assumption is that McCarthy was offered a dollar amount that was high enough not only to woo McCarthy away from Apple, but also to convince her to move to the United Kingdom for several years.
According to the filing, on April 7, 2022 Lucasfilm and McCarthy reached an agreement that was acceptable enough to move forward as specific items were put in writing. An email from Candice Campos, Lucasfilm’s Vice President of Physical Productions, to McCarthy’s agent David Morris stated “we really want to make this work!” as McCarthy traveled to the UK and began working on the series.
When production started on April 22, McCarthy was informed that Lucasfilm wanted out of the deal and that her services were no longer required. In short, she was fired after two weeks. The production of Apple’s Sugar had moved forward without McCarthy and a replacement had been found. McCarthy had now missed out on two lucrative employment opportunities that could have provided abundant residuals for decades.
The lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court, states that when McCarthy requested payment for her work on the series, Lucasfilm offered her $5,000 for just a single day’s work. This presumably low payment is what most likely precipitated the lawsuit and a listing of grievances implying a malicious and negligent patter on Leslye Headland’s part.
Additional details from the filing include that The Acolyte was prepared to be a multi-season, high-budget production (therefore not a limited series) and that episodes would be greater than forty minutes long. Star Wars is a special effects-driven franchise, so a large portion of that budget would have likely gone to post-production.
Rumors about the production of The Acolyte have been flying for years, with noted scooper Kamran Pasha stating the he felt that the show might never happen at all, with budgets being cut down to the point that Kennedy and Headland had resorted to shooting a multi-million dollar initial episode akin to a traditional pilot in order to sell the series to Bob Chapek (or his predecessor and successor Bob Iger).
As Star Wars fandom continues to divide. The show has a roster of recognizable talent including Carrie-Ann Moss from The Matrix franchise, Lee Jun-jae from Netflix’s Korean smash hit Squid Game, and Manny Jacinto from NBC’s The Good Place, but the show’s titular Acolyte is played by the non-binary Amandla Stenberg. It is unknown at this time if her character will also be non-binary. The show also takes place in the High Republic era, which has not found a firm footing in the fan community.
The official synopsis of the show:
The Acolyte is a mystery-thriller that will take viewers into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark-side powers in the final days of the High Republic era. A former Padawan reunites with her Jedi Master to investigate a series of crimes, but the forces they confront are more sinister than they ever anticipated.
It seems in Lucasfilm and its parent Walt Disney Company’s best interest for this lawsuit to be settled out of court. Speculation on the lawsuit will run rampant in a fan community that sees blood in the water as theories about Kathleen Kennedy’s eventually exit have been fodder for online criticism for years. If this lawsuit becomes a public spectacle and reaches the discovery phase, an eager audience will pore over every detail for years as they try to confirm their theories about the current state of the once-legendary Lucasfilm. This would resulting in a rare crossover between the LawTube community and the Star Wars fan community on social media.
Fervor against Kathleen Kennedy (and Harvey Weinstein’s former assistant Leslye Headland) is high as interest in current productions of Star Wars are at an all-time low. The Walt Disney Company’s Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser was so unpopular that offerings were just cut in half. The last Disney+ Star Wars show, a spin-off series featuring Rogue One supporting character Cassian Andor, barely registered in viewership.
Could this debacle be the final goodbye to Kathleen Kennedy, or is it just another step in the post-George Lucas history of Lucasfilm? Stay tuned to That Park Place for more coverage as this story develops.
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