Kathleen Kennedy Left Star Wars and Got the L.A. Olympics. The Galaxy Was Too Small
The former Lucasfilm boss replaces Peter Rice as LA28's head of ceremonies. Four shows, two stadiums, and nobody can ask for a director's cut.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
Kathleen Kennedy, who ran Lucasfilm until her exit from Star Wars, has been named head of ceremonies and content for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, replacing Peter Rice, who stays on as an executive producer. Ben Winston is executive producer and creative director. LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman called her one of Hollywood's all-time greats, which is the sort of thing you say about a person right before handing her four live shows with no second take.
Here's the job. The Olympic opening ceremony is July 14, 2028, split between the Coliseum and the new stadium in Inglewood. The closing is July 30 at the Coliseum. The Paralympics open on Aug. 15 and close on Aug. 27. That's four ceremonies, two venues and a few billion viewers, and every one of them has an opinion about Paris.
Kennedy is the right choice in one way, and I mean it. Before Star Wars she helped make E.T. and Jurassic Park, and nobody alive knows better how to get a crowd to cry at a spaceship. She is also, to some portion of the internet, the most hated woman in the history of laser swords, a person who could cure a disease and still get a thousand comments about the sequels.
So naturally she's taking the one job with a bigger audience and a smaller tolerance for mistakes. In Star Wars, if the story goes wrong, you can fix it with a streaming series and a puppet. At the Olympics, if a flaming torch doesn't light, it's on the evening news in two hundred countries, and the puppet is the Secretary of State.
There is something very Hollywood about this. A woman spends a decade getting yelled at by men in Boba Fett helmets and is rewarded with the chance to get yelled at by entire nations. Only in Los Angeles does a career get promoted by its critics.
Still, I'm hopeful. She'll make it big, she'll make it emotional, and somewhere in the middle there'll be a drone show shaped like a droid that nobody admits they asked for. That's the Olympics. Every four years the world comes together to agree on nothing except that the parade went long.