Kathleen Kennedy Says Rian Johnson “Got Spooked” By Online Backlash & Backed Away From His ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy

With toxic fandom being what it is these days—vitriolic, nasty, mean-spirited—creating within the genre space can be a challenging business. Filmmaker Rian Johnson, one of the nicest guys in the industry, a mensch, learned that lesson pretty hard during his time on “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” a Lucasfilm that was a huge hit, grossing $1.3 billion worldwide, but was swiftly met with fan backlash in the middle of the bubbling 2017 culture wars online.

READ MORE: Rian Johnson’s ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy Is “Effectively Dead”

Right after the success of ‘The Last Jedi,’ before the backlash grew, Johnson was quickly tapped to direct a new “Star Wars” trilogy, but it never came to pass. Johnson turned his energy and attention to his “Knives Out” mystery film, which soon blossomed into its own trilogy.

While fans held out hope over the years of Johnson returning to “Star Wars,” the filmmaker, promoting “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” recently admitted that his saga in a galaxy far, far away was “effectively dead.”

Now, on her way out the door, former Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy sounded willing to connect dots the company usually left to fans and forums. In a Deadline exit interview—Kennedy just stepped down from her role at the company—she argued the long-promised Johnson trilogy didn’t just drift because of time and scheduling, though it was a factor; she also believed the temperature of the discourse did real damage.

“Once he made the Netflix deal and went off to start doing the ‘Knives Out’ films, that has occupied a huge amount of his time,” Kennedy said. “That’s the other thing that happens here. After Shawn [Levy] and I started talking about ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Stranger Things’ [kicked] in, and he was completely consumed for a while by that. That’s what happened with Rian.”

Then she added what fans had long suspected—but Lucasfilm executives rarely said aloud: the backlash itself left scars.

“And then I do believe he got spooked by the online negativity. I think Rian made one of the best Star Wars movies. He’s a brilliant filmmaker, and he got spooked. This is the rough part. When people come into this space, I have every filmmaker and actors say to me, ‘What’s going to happen?’ They’re a little scared.”

While that’s not quite confirmation of what happened, it is her belief after all, not his words; it still sounds like an acknowledgment of what the ‘Last Jedi’ era became—an object lesson in how toxic fan ecosystems can bend the arc of a billion-dollar franchise.

In 2017, “The Last Jedi” was positioned as a bold creative leap: Johnson’s deconstruction of the mythic hero, his subversion of nostalgia, and his insistence that failure and renewal were the saga’s true legacy. But online outrage metastasized into a movement, one that weaponized social media outrage into culture-war currency.

When StarWars.com announced in November 2017 that Johnson would develop a new trilogy “separate from the Skywalker saga,” it looked like a franchise-sustaining vote of confidence. Kennedy praised his craftsmanship, saying she was excited to see “what’s in store” for his original story world. Yet by 2020, Johnson’s attention had shifted elsewhere.

Support independent movie journalism to keep it alive. Sign up for The Playlist Newsletter. All the content you want and, oh, right, it’s free.

His Netflix partnership—reportedly a $450 million deal for two sequels to “Knives Out”—consumed his creative bandwidth. The first sequel, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” became a massive streaming success, and another installment is already on the way. Johnson has consistently described the “Star Wars” project as unfinished business rather than a casualty, telling outlets that he’d “be thrilled” to return when schedules align.

But given his recent comments, which sounded like the final nail in the coffin, Johnson’s time in the “Star Wars” galaxy, unfortunately, may just have been a one-and-done.