Once the debacle that is Kathleen Kennedy’s tenure as President of Lucasfilm is finally over and she no longer has creative influence with the Star Wars franchise, the new regime needs to start making amends as soon as possible.

In a world with streaming services and binge watching, the viewing habits have shifted and the old guard, especially Kennedy, seemed to have been asleep at the wheel when the path to success curved in front of them.

To say Kennedy was a disaster is putting it lightly. She took the best franchise in movie history and turned it into a creative embarrassment while, at the same time, destroying the lone light in its future by putting her own political and personal beliefs over that of the creative universe she was hired to foster.

Until then, her attachment to everything Spielberg (with Frank Marshall) made her a hero of mine. It’s sad to see her go down in flames over something as petty as political leanings and creative hubris.

But, Hollywood is a bottom line business and she lowered herself to the point of no return.

So, here we stand with a great franchise that has been misused and abused by its handlers.

What to do next?

Get back to planning and telling stories.

A basic tenet of every screenplay is to know where you are going to end before you start writing. Everything you do from FADE IN should lead to a powerful climax and FADE OUT. This approach applies to both a single story or a franchise.

George Lucas had one idea that he couldn’t fit into one movie, so he created the original trilogy. The opening of A New Hope, and everything in between, was leading to Luke’s battle with his father, Darth Vader, and for us to find out if blood was stronger than the force.  You could argue Lucas’ subsequent prequel trilogy lacked the same focus (or acting), but at least it was a semi-logical series of films that led to the inevitable we knew was coming.

And then, the sequels. They started with a bang, continued with frustration and anger, and ended with “what the hell just happened?”

JJ Abrams, the director of the first and third films in this latest run, recently admitted that they should have planned the sequel trilogy as a whole instead of making them up one film at a time.

My response to that was… ‘No sh*t, Sherlock!’

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How do you enter the Star Wars universe to make a sequel trilogy on the Skywalker lineage without knowing how the hell the story was going to end?

Kennedy said there wasn’t enough source material, like Marvel and it’s comic books, to draw from. This statement should have single handedly jettisoned her from the franchise. There were hundreds of novels at their disposal to review.

Instead, JJ decided to remake A New Hope with The Force Awakens, Rian Johnson, with The Last Jedi, decided to break everything JJ had put into place with a story devoid of basic logic while, at the same time, offering new insights into a universe with the force, and then JJ came back with Rise of Skywalker to try to reclaim his creative foundations from Awakens while, also attempting to bring to closure a story line that had turned into a sh*t show.

What Kennedy, Johnson and Abrams forgot to recognize is that, in a world where the Disney vault is always open and an entire library of shows and movies are at consumer’s fingertips, the most important value the streaming services can provide is a complete story arc.

People will sit down on Saturday and binge nine hours of Star Wars tales with the expectation that it will make sense and be a complete, memorable and, perhaps, moving story.  Fans would much rather have three movies that are great than nine that are mediocre. They’d rather have a single story told over ten episodes in the one and only season of a show’s existence than have one with promise that meanders and sticks around too long until no one cares anymore.

Out of all the Star Wars movies to come out since Disney acquired the franchise, only two films and one series have reached the level worthy of the Star Wars name: Rogue One, Solo: A Star Wars Story and The Mandalorian. (I’m not including any animated kid shows, as I have not watched them)

Rogue One was a powerful and moving tale, a stand alone film that connected to A New Hope in a way as to take our breath away. Solo was a wonderful introduction into the pre-Skywalker life of Han Solo, Chewie, Lando and others. It was fun, clever, with betrayal and a powerful villain, making me long for the other two films that (I hope) were planned to follow it. And, of course, The Mandalorian saved Star Wars from cinematic oblivion and what would have been Disney’s biggest failure in its long history. Then, Kennedy had to screw up the goodwill generated by that series by pushing today’s politics into a galaxy far, far away.

Thankfully, Kennedy’s reign is ending and I’m hopeful those who found gold in the vast Star Wars story mine to come up with The Mandalorian will turn a decade of lemons into a century of lemonade.

We’ll see how the other series fare.

Unlike Marvel, which is trying to keep momentum with a universe they had successfully taken us through over a 21 movie story arc, Star Wars, because of its own ineptitude, still has a chance at a comeback. Where Marvel showed us the peak of its universe with Infinity War and End Game, Star Wars still has a universe of unrealized potential.

Let’s hope the new captains steering the Star Wars ship remember that no journey begins without plotting a course on a map, and no movie, trilogies or TV series, should begin without knowing where they will end up.

And the ending should make us wanting to join them on their next trip.

Otherwise, don’t start filming and rewrite it until it does.