No, Kathleen Kennedy Isn’t Retiring from Lucasfilm

As we tried to tell everyone when the “news” from a dubious source was first reported earlier this week, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy is NOT, we repeat, NOT retiring yet. She’s now cleared the air a bit about this, and other upcoming bits of news from the galaxy far, far away.

“Any discussion previously about me retiring or quitting or any of those things, that’s complete rumor mill because through all these reports, I have just continued doing my job, and continuing my contract,” Kennedy said. “Nothing unusual. It all has just been manufactured.”

“The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies,” Kennedy told Deadline in a new and timely interview. “That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring. What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob [Iger] and Alan [Bergman] about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing ‘Mandalorian‘ the movie right now, and I’m also producing Sean Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it.”

And as to the near feeding frenzy of what we’d also describe as personal vendetta against Kennedy that others have called ‘chaos…’

“Chaos? There has never been any chaos because we know exactly what the plan is. And we’ve been talking about it, as I said, nonstop for the last couple of years because for obvious reasons, I’m not going to be here forever,” Kennedy said. “George [Lucas] asked me 13 years ago to step in, and now I’m looking at who’s going to replace me. And as I said, we have a bench of people internally to handle the business, the creative side. The job has grown also since I stepped in. There was no streaming, there weren’t a lot of the things that we’re involved in right now going on. So it has grown.”