I used to love “Star Wars.”
I wonder how many people all over the globe say that. It can’t be a small amount. Whenever anything Star Wars-related was released, it was a major event. It was the most celebrated science fiction franchise in the world. Bring up a picture of the Millennium Falcon; if you were in any country, the people there would automatically know what it is. Now, the brand is clearly struggling.
There’s been a steady decline in viewership for Star Wars releases. “Ahsoka” only garnered 1.2 million viewers in the first week. “The Book of Boba Fett” wasn’t any better at 1.9. Even the once-celebrated “The Mandalorian” had only 1.6 million viewers in the first four days compared to Season 2’s 2.08 million.
When “Rogue One” was released in 2016, it raked in over $1 billion. When “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was released just two years later, it only raked in over $392 million globally.
Such was the damage Kathleen Kennedy had done to the galaxy far, far away.
My colleague Brad Slager has an excellent article about Kennedy’s absolute failure to uphold the franchise’s quality due to her obsession with pushing social justice messaging in the faces of the viewers, specifically that of “feminism” and “diversity.”
READ: ‘Be Successful, This Will Not’ – Kathleen Kennedy Shows Disney Has Learned Nothing from Its Woke Failures
Indeed, a recent New York Times puff piece focused on Leslye Headland, Harvey Weinstein’s former right-hand girl and now Kennedy acolyte. She has a new show coming out called “The Acolyte,” which makes sense because most Disney creations are just self-inserts from its creators nowadays, and wouldn’t you know it, Kennedy herself bemoans that Star Wars has a male-dominated audience:
In a brief telephone interview, Kennedy’s support for “The Acolyte” wasA steadfast. “My belief is that storytelling does need to be representative of all people,” she said. “That’s an easy decision for me.”
“Operating within these giant franchises now, with social media and the level of expectation — it’s terrifying,” Kennedy continued. “I think Leslye has struggled a little bit with it. I think a lot of the women who step into ‘Star Wars’ struggle with this a bit more. Because of the fan base being so male dominated, they sometimes get attacked in ways that can be quite personal.”
Headland has tried to limit her exposure to the online conversation, both good and bad, instead relying on friends for “weather reports.”
I won’t go too far into the fact that she’s bubbling herself off from the rest of the world which is par for the course for the woke Hollywood elite who can’t be too careful about who they talk to and associate with for fear of hard facts and inconvenient truths lurking around strange corners. One such inconvenient truth is that the problem isn’t the audience.
Anger about the fall of Star Wars isn’t on its fans, it’s on Disney, Kennedy, and its modern plunderers. A fall that happened because it didn’t see Star Wars for what it was, they saw the franchise for its potential to be a carrier of a message the Hollywood elite have convinced themselves is gospel. They saw Star Wars as a thing to fix, to reshape, repurpose, and release. “The force is female!” Kennedy declared, but it wasn’t just a bad thing to emblazon on a shirt for photo ops, it was a bad business decision.
It’s a sentence that summed up the attitude of Kennedy and the divisive direction she wanted to take it. The force wasn’t female, it was the force, a nebulous energy that surrounds and permeated all things. But Kennedy’s declaration was a wink and nod that feminism had now taken the brand. That was her raising the social justice flag over the conquered stronghold.
Feminism was a divisive ideology to begin with. Now add to the fact that it’s one of the largest cogs in the intersectional political machine and you now have a brand that appeals exclusively to those interested in that ideological leaning.
Kennedy and those like her say that Star Wars is more inclusive now. It’s not. It excluded anyone who thinks Star Wars should be about epic intergalactic battles, the struggle between good and evil, and space wizards with laser swords, not socio-political box-checking, self-inserts, and divisive ideological messaging.
Here’s another inconvenient truth that Disney and the Star Wars brand’s handlers or its followers don’t want to hear.
When Star Wars was geared more toward a male audience it was a series for everyone, including women. The Star Wars universe had an established logic to it. There were heroes, villains, good and evil, redemption, and character development for unique characters that could be unique because they didn’t have to follow the rules of modern mainstream politics, something I’d argue will date it severely once most people have had it with social justice’s tyrannical demands.
Kennedy’s injection of personal, West Coast-inspired politics made the galaxy far, far away feel like it was just adjacent to California.
It’s a political belief that is very exclusionary to traditional ideas under the belief that they’re somehow evil, outdated, and prone to modern social sins. In this mistaken belief, it holds various groups as less than others and guilty of original sin, with men being considered “problematic” strictly for the crime of being male and having a penchant for liking things males like. The thinking is that in order for Star Wars to be more inclusive, it must reject male-centric qualities.
In doing so, Kennedy displays the true nature of social justice by infecting the Star Wars brand with it. It specializes in exclusion and masks it as inclusion. Now it only appeals to a handful of people because, as Kennedy complained, there are elements in the fandom and the qualities these people have that aren’t as welcome as others.
This thinking caused a fundamental reshaping of what Star Wars was, but when you fundamentally change something it’s no longer the thing that it was. Star Wars is no longer around. Whatever it is now has the same name. It shares some of the same lore. It even has some of the same characters in it.
But it’s not Star Wars. It’s another entity wearing a Star Wars mask that is ever slipping off.
The brand is now unrecognizable save for its visual elements. By their own admission, there is no more good and evil in the show. The hero’s journey has been replaced with the message. Box-checking comes before character development. The force isn’t strong with a few select people anymore, it can be tapped by anyone now. No one is special in their own way, now everyone can be special for the same reason because equality!
Also, lightsabers can be whips now. Why not?
Kennedy and her ilk were so busy remaking Star Wars into their brand that they forgot it was never theirs to begin with. It belonged to the fans worldwide. The universe they had fallen in love with was special. It was for everyone because it had elements that everyone could relate to.
Now it doesn’t. Now it’s just for a few select people who either love the new message it focuses on or will stomach it for the sake of a brand they can’t let go of loving. The focus on feminism and the intersectional nonsense that comes with it has excluded everyone else. These fans didn’t leave Star Wars, Star Wars left them and were called sexist and racist by the brand as it walked away from the beloved story it was.
Maybe one day Star Wars will make a glorious return to form, but it won’t anytime soon. Not while it’s owned by Disney. Not while it’s under the divisive and imbittered oversight of people like Kennedy.
So long as “the force is female,” it won’t be a franchise for many. So long as “the force is female,” the force is dead.
