A recurring theme among all of the shared mythologies to pop up in the wake of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s game-changing success has been the lack of a Kevin Feige figure, someone at the top of the food chain who makes all of the major calls that trickle down the hierarchy, ensuring that everyone’s working from the same playbook.
It’s simple in theory, but Hollywood’s elephant graveyard is littered with the bones of would-be franchises that tried to beat Usain Bolt in a footrace before they’d even mastered the art of crawling. On the plus side, Disney and Lucasfilm’s small screen expansion of Star Wars looks to be in supremely safe hands, even if the fans are wary of Kathleen Kennedy’s contract potentially being extended.
With the exception of George Lucas himself, there’s arguably nobody in the industry that knows the ins and outs of Star Wars better than Dave Filoni, and he’s ascended from a storyboard artist and visual developer to Lucasfilm’s Executive Creative Director in little over a decade, so he’s clearly very good at his job.
To that end, we’re now hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Disney were interested in a Free Guy sequel long before Ryan Reynolds made it official – that Filoni is being positioned by the studio as their Feige, someone who can steer the ship from the helm and oversee the entire slate of Star Wars shows in various stages of development and production for streaming.
It’d be a smart call when Kennedy has the entirety of Lucasfilm to deal with, and Jon Favreau isn’t going to spend the rest of his career working exclusively in Star Wars, whereas Filoni hasn’t been credited on anything that wasn’t set in a galaxy far, far away since 2005, so he’s been fully and almost solely immersed in the property for sixteen years and counting.
