For over a decade, Star Wars fans have argued about the sequel trilogy George Lucas supposedly handed to Disney — and what the studio did with it. Now the woman who took over Lucasfilm from Lucas himself says those famous story treatments barely existed at all.
In an interview at Bloomberg Screentime 2026 in Los Angeles with Businessweek editor Brad Stone, former Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy recalled asking Lucas what material existed for the franchise's future as she prepared to succeed him. "So, George, the stories that we're going to do next. I mean, is there anything I should look at?" she remembered asking. Lucas's answer: "No, no, it's all here," pointing to his head.
Pressed on the widely reported story treatments, Kennedy was blunt. "We had a couple of paragraphs. He didn't really have story treatments," she said. She explained that Lucasfilm instead leaned on its internal creative team — including Dave Filoni, who had worked closely with Lucas for years — as a living archive of his ideas for the galaxy far, far away.
That account clashes with several on-the-record versions of the 2012 handover. Former Disney CEO Bob Iger wrote in his 2019 memoir The Ride of a Lifetime that Disney had purchased Lucas's treatments as part of the $4.05 billion deal. At the time of the acquisition, Disney CFO Jay Rasulo publicly described Lucas's material as "a pretty extensive and detailed treatment for what would be the next three movies." Lucas himself has also spoken over the years about his sequel concepts, which reportedly centered on Darth Maul building a criminal empire with an apprentice named Darth Talon, alongside ideas about the grandchildren of Darth Vader and the mysterious Whills of the Force.
Kennedy's version does not necessarily erase those accounts — a few paragraphs of ideas can preserve characters and directions without amounting to the developed narrative documents fans picture when they hear the word "treatments." But her telling reframes the handover as far thinner on paper than Disney's 2012 messaging suggested, with institutional memory doing the heavy lifting instead.
The conversation ranged beyond the sequel trilogy. Kennedy defended Star Wars' expansion into streaming as true to its roots. "George Lucas started out with serialized storytelling. That's what inspired him with, you know, Buck Rogers and that kind of cliffhanger storytelling," she said, adding that the franchise "absolutely needs to" live in both film and television.
She also discussed stepping down after 14 years running Lucasfilm, saying she was "not feeling bittersweet" about handing leadership to Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan. "I suppose there's a bit of relief. These jobs are not easy and stepping into something like that that George [Lucas] had created was an incredible challenge," she said. She named Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Mandalorian, and Andor as the projects she is proudest of from her tenure.
Source: Bloomberg
