Insider Claims Kathleen Kennedy is not Woke

Movies

Is Kathleen Kennedy the fall guy for her woke Disney overlords and Lucasfilm underlings? That’s what insider Matthew Belloni believes, in contrast to the common perception of the Lucasfilm president whom South Park hilariously parodied last fall. Speaking on his podcast, The Town, Belloni says that sources have told him Kennedy “has to be convinced” to do all the disastrous things she’s done to sap the fun out of and inject the social messaging into Star Wars. Here’s the quote via Screen Rant:

“But Kathleen Kennedy is not… That whole South Park thing was… It was funny, but it wasn’t accurate. Within Disney, she’s not known as the ‘woke warrior.’ She kind of has to be convinced, from everything I’ve been told, she kind of has to be convinced to do this stuff.”

You’re kidding me, right? I don’t doubt Belloni heard this from Disney/Lucasfilm insiders; he doesn’t strike me as the type to make things up, and he’s forthcoming with information like that, no matter how it makes anyone look. But I think he’s being fed nonsense by a studio desperate to rehabilitate their most visible member’s image. That South Park special Belloni mentions was hilarious, but I think it had a bigger impact than Disney is comfortable with. “Put a chick in it, make her gay” has ingrained itself in the culture because it perfectly encapsulates what Disney and other studios have been doing over the past few years. They don’t have much of a counter to it, so they’re trying – feebly, because it won’t work – to disassociate Kathleen Kennedy from it because she was the one South Park made the avatar for the pandering method. I’m sure she’s far from the only one at Disney/Lucasfilm who thinks this way (Bob Iger clearly does), but she’s one of them, and I don’t think she has to be convinced of anything.

If Disney really wants to dispel this image, the only way is just to stop doing it. If you let the woke stuff go and focus on making good, entertaining movies for long enough, people may forget, or at least stop caring. But they refuse; the same day Bob Iger won his proxy war with Nelson Peltz and assured everyone that Disney wasn’t interested in identity politics anymore, they announced that The Fantastic 4 would have a female Silver Surfer. They’re not going to stop until the entire company is about to collapse, and they probably won’t even stop then. Kathleen Kennedy is a part of that, and Star Wars under her stewardship was one of the bellwethers for what was coming from Disney; The Last Jedi came out a year before Captain Marvel. She’s not the sole source of woke at the company, but she fits right in with the rest of them.