Star Wars enters a new era as Ahsoka‘s Dave Filoni becomes Chief Creative Officer

To some Star Wars fans, Clone Wars architect Dave Filoni is the second-coming of George Lucas—the one man who can be trusted with Star Wars lore now that Disney is running things. To others, he represents nearly all of the franchise’s silliest missteps, pulling Star Wars away from the stories and characters of the movies toward new creations or deep pulls from the mythology that demand a level of fandom (and work) that Star Wars never required before. And now, love him or hate him, Filoni is going to be running things over at the galaxy far, far away.

He’s not replacing Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, who has shepherded the franchise in its post-Lucas era, but he has been appointed the company’s new Chief Creative Officer, which will involve him working directly with Kennedy to help plan out “the next generation of Star Wars shows and movies.” That comes from a new Vanity Fair piece, in which Filoni says that, before, he would be brought into a project “after it had already developed a good ways,” but now he’ll be right there with “basically everything that’s going on.” When Lucasfilm is making plans for the future, he’ll be “involved at the inception phase.”

It sounds like he’ll be taking a role similar to what Kevin Feige does with Marvel Studios or what James Gunn is doing with DC now, which is probably a good idea for Star Wars (The Rise Of Skywalker is not the kind of movie you make when you have any sort of plan), but Filoni is also known for making a specific kind of Star Wars thing and putting him in this kind of position sends a message about what Lucasfilm wants Star Wars to be.

The middling Ahsoka series was Filoni’s baby, and one of its big problems was that it was wholly dedicated to expanding its mythology rather than telling a coherent story. But, at the same time, he’s a big part of The Mandalorian, which is generally pretty good. But, he was also a big part of The Book Of Boba Fett, which was not good. So it’s hard to say if this is positive or not, but it does indicate that Lucasfilm wants to focus more on things like those three and less on things like, say, Andor, which Filoni did not make and which presented a very different vision of that universe from anything he’s made.