Update: The Kennedy era’s endgame comes into focus: a massive Star Wars reboot is incoming, and Marvel’s own reset spells it out.
Kathleen Kennedy goes out exactly as she came in.
Kennedy has exited Lucasfilm, but the wreckage is still washing ashore, and now the trades are assigning blame by name.
On Monday’s episode of The Town, Puck’s Matt Belloni named the former Lucasfilm boss one of Hollywood’s biggest losers of 2026 over The Mandalorian & Grogu and said it was her movie: “One final kissoff disaster she left behind before she stepped down at the beginning of this year.”
Kennedy joins good company on that list, as the same episode named James Gunn and Peter Safran the biggest losers in Hollywood over Supergirl.
‘By Far The Lowest Grossing Of Any Star Wars Project’
The numbers first: The Mandalorian & Grogu topped out around $339 million worldwide. As Belloni put it, “Not great for a Star Wars movie. By far the lowest-grossing of any Star Wars project.”
Notably, Belloni goes out of his way to absolve Jon Favreau: “The movie was fine. Favreau did a good job… he’s a very commercial filmmaker when he wants to be. But he was a director for hire on this one. They came to him and said why don’t we do this as a theatrical movie. So that was coming from Disney — and whether it was Kathy or whether it was Alan Bergman or even Iger that said let’s play it absolutely safe.”
He also refused to let current Lucasfilm leadership off the hook: Dave Filoni “was very involved in this movie too. He’s a Mandalorian guy as well, and so he is not blameless here.”
When Lucas Shaw ribbed him — “You just had to kick her on the way out” — Belloni didn’t blink: “I did, because nobody was talking about the fact that she did this.”
‘They Played It Absolutely Safe And It’s Blown Up In Their Face’
Belloni’s diagnosis of the strategy is brutal: “They didn’t have a Star Wars movie for 7 years, and to relaunch the movie franchise with a TV show episode did not work.”
He kept going: “This is the problem with Star Wars. They played it absolutely safe and it’s blown up in their face. They couldn’t do a Lord and Miller Star Wars movie — ‘it was too outside the box.’ But yet they’re bringing the Emperor back in Rise of Skywalker because it was just the bottom line base: what will the fans be okay with? And they thought that was the same with the Mandalorian movie. Turns out not true.”
And the verdict on the film itself: “You didn’t learn anything about The Mandalorian. There was nothing new. There were no big stars in it. They did two episodes of the show. They were good episodes of the show, but that’s not enough. That’s not theatrical.”
This is now a “TV franchise,” per Belloni. A 50-year-old theatrical crown jewel, reduced to that.
The Road To The Bomb Ran Through Season 3
What Belloni describes as playing it safe, CBN readers will recognize as something more specific, because the collapse didn’t start at the box office.
It started on Disney+.
Recall that Grogu left with Luke Skywalker at the end of Season 2 to train as a Jedi — a genuine story turn — only to be abruptly returned to Din Djarin (via The Book of Boba Fett) ahead of Season 3.
The longstanding rumor is that Kennedy mandated Grogu’s return over merchandise sales, story be damned. That’s a rumor, not confirmed, but what followed is on the record: Season 3 served up the Jack Black and Lizzo stunt casting that got torched by fans, and Nielsen ratings dropped nearly 40%.
A planned Season 4 then morphed into The Mandalorian & Grogu for theaters. Lucasfilm took a series bleeding its audience, promoted it to the big screen as the franchise’s grand theatrical relaunch, and got the lowest-grossing Star Wars project ever for it.
The Appetite ‘Wasn’t There’ — Because The Audience Already Left
Belloni says “the appetite for a TV show movie was not there.” Half right. The appetite for Star Wars wasn’t there, and that’s the part the trades still tiptoe around.
This is the story we’ve been documenting for years: Star Wars lost as much as 85% of its audience, and the fix made it worse.
The franchise sat in theatrical hiatus, and when it came back with The Mandalorian & Grogu, the fans didn’t come back with it.
The era that produced the Gina Carano firing while Pedro Pascal got a pass ended exactly how it was always going to end, with Kennedy blaming the fans on her way out the door and a slate of projects on hold behind her.
The rest of the industry has figured it out, even if nobody at Lucasfilm will say it: Hollywood is now doing a 180 and courting the very fans it spent a decade shunning, with David Ellison bringing the receipts.
“Playing it safe” was never the disease. It was the last symptom.
‘We’ll See What Shawn Levy Does Next Year With Gosling’
Belloni closed the segment with the stakes for what comes next: “We’ll see what Shawn Levy does next year with Gosling. One final kissoff from Kathy Kennedy.”
The same episode, it’s worth noting, named Ryan Gosling a winner of 2026 — Project Hail Mary “reasserted his primacy as a star who can get movies made almost on his own,” with an Oscar nomination called “as close to a shoe-in as possible.”
That’s the horse the post-Kennedy era is betting on with Star Wars: Starfighter and Gosling’s Cade.
The timing puts all of this front and center in two weeks: Lucasfilm hits Hall H on July 24, with Star Wars: The Experience and the franchise’s 50th anniversary push already queued up for 2027.
The pitch will be that a new era has begun. The Mandalorian & Grogu is the receipt for the old one, and now even the trades are reading it out loud.
The Belloni verdict on Kennedy playing it too safe now looks like part of a bigger pattern, with a new breakdown arguing Mandalorian & Grogu, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Supergirl all bombed by running the same losing playbook across Marvel, DC, and Lucasfilm.
