Ahsoka’s Dave Filoni May Soon Be Running ‘Star Wars’

With Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy on her way out, the open question is who will succeed her in that role. A new report points to a familiar choice, someone with both fans and detractors in the Star Wars space.

In a lengthy THR piece about Disney executive power, when it comes to Lucasfilm, Dave Filoni is the name that comes up. Here’s the section:

“The current thinking is a scenario where chief creative officer Dave Filoni and production head Carrie Beck — both Lucasfilm vets — take co-head roles. Even as an arm of Disney, Lucasfilm remains, in many ways, a family business, and as a George Lucas protégé Filoni long has been considered a golden boy.”

Perfect, right? Well, here are the downsides:

“But the knock against him is that he might be too steeped in Star Wars lore and risks steering a show into dense mythology that loses a broader audience. “He’s not the Andor guy, he’s the Ahsoka guy,” says one Disney insider. Beck, who joined the company in 2012, knows the ins and outs, but neither she nor Filoni has much film experience, which could be mitigated by Kennedy’s continued presence as a producer on certain Star Wars projects, ensuring quality control in the short term.”

I’ve seen a lot of Star Wars fans read this and say “of course you want a Lucas guy who knows a ton of dense Star Wars mythology!” I can see that position, but the counterpoint isn’t wrong. Andor just wrapped up a two-season run as inarguably one of the best pieces of Star Wars content ever made. You might expect that to lead to an immediate appointment of whoever did that to a top spot, but that’s Tony Gilroy, and he’s simply moving on to other things. The most promising word from him is “never say never,” but he’s not even close to the conversation here.

A “co-head” role with Filoni and Carrie Beck sounds like what DC is doing with James Gunn and Peter Safran, but it’s very much Gunn as the face and captain. The same would be true of Filoni.

Filoni has been heavily involved in The Mandalorian from its inception, as he is the upcoming Mandalorian and Grogu movie. His pet project series, Ahsoka, is currently the only Disney Plus project getting a second season, but one that appears like it will arrive three years after season 1.

Filoni’s issue is that he has a fixed set of die-hard fans who have been following his work since his animated series The Clone Wars and its follow-up, Rebels. But a lot of his work within the universe so far has been getting many of those characters into live-action and present-day Disney projects. Great for fans of those shows, but they still have to work on their own.

Still, Filoni seems like the logical choice given the options at hand. I do wonder how much the success or failure of the upcoming Mandalorian and Grogu will factor into all this, as that’s a film that will be emblematic of his brand, given that he co-wrote it with director Jon Favreau. There was a time when Favreau seemed to have been considered to run Lucasfilm with Filoni, but that idea isn’t mentioned in this latest piece.

It’s a fraught time for Star Wars. Andor is a stunning achievement. Andor also cost $650 million for a show not that many people watched, and its talent is leaving to go elsewhere, including Kathleen Kennedy, who was the show’s biggest champion. So, what happens now?

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.