In a move that will this time, surely, for real, 100% absolutely save the Star Wars brand, Lucasfilm has announced that they have officially tapped Star Wars Rebels and Ahsoka creator Dave Filoni to serve as the company’s new Chief Creative Officer.
This promotion for the cowboy-hat-clad director was first revealed by Filoni himself during a recent interview with Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican.
“Now I’m what’s called chief creative officer of Lucasfilm,” he told Breznican. “In the past, in a lot of projects I would be brought into it, I would see it after it had already developed a good ways.”
In his new role, Filoni will now work directly alongside Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and head of development Carrie Beck in shaping Star Wars’ future, Filoni detailed, “In this new role, it’s opened up to basically everything that’s going on.”
“When we’re planning the future of what we’re doing now, I’m involved at the inception phase,” he added.
According to Breznican, per this new arrangement, Kennedy will remain in charge of Lucasfilm overall, Beck will bear responsibility for recruiting new creatives onto the Star Wars team, and Filoni will be tasked with offering narrative oversight on all future projects.
Elaborating on his new position, Filoni noted, “I’m not telling people what to do, but I do feel I’m trying to help them tell the best story that they want to tell. I need to be a help across the galaxy here, like a part of a Jedi Council almost.”
“To truly help filmmakers, it was really important for me to experience it firsthand,” he continued. “I can also lend a perspective on the challenges that telling these stories will present. I feel more capable of actually being helpful outside of just saying, ‘Well, Jedi are like this, and Sith are like this…’”
However, just because Filoni now has a whole new set of responsibilities does not mean he’s abandoning his previous commitment to his planned Star Wars feature film.
“I’m setting up what seems to be a larger conflict with the Imperial remnant,” Filoni reaffirmed of his plans for a silver screen continuation of Ahsoka’s story. “That conflict can’t just mirror what we’ve seen before. It has to take on a different shape. It can’t just be the Empire versus what looks like the Rebellion, or even the Republic. It has to be visually different.”
Unfortunately for Star Wars fans, Filoni’s promotion to ‘narrative overseer’ does not necessarily bode well for the franchise’s future prospects, most notably due to his own flippant attitude towards respecting its well-established canon.
Speaking to ScreenRant during the Star Wars Celebration 2023 event in London, England, Filoni opined, “People get into all of these debates of what’s canon, what’s not, and sometimes forget just the special nature of telling a good story and creating great characters.”
“Part of the fan debate in the past always used to be what’s canon, what’s not, because there was George and we always knew George was the canon,” he told the outlet. “I look at it very broadly and just say, there’s just a love of Star Wars. Because I knew George, I worked with him. None of us are going to be him, but we love the galaxy he created and we are very much a product of it, growing up with it.”
As of writing, it is unclear which of Lucasfilm’s future Star Wars projects will be the first to receive input from Filoni in his official capacity as COO.