In the handful of days since the announcement that venerated producer Kathleen Kennedy would be stepping down from her leadership position at Lucasfilm and be replaced by the duo of Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, there has been rampant speculation and reporting regarding what may come next for the Star Wars franchise. Prior to this announcement, it had been rumored for years that Lucasfilm was positioning Filoni to be a leader moving forward, something that had become pretty evident in just how much Star Wars stuff he had a hand in post-2019. After delivering Disney+ its single biggest draw at the time of launch, in the form of The Mandalorian, Filoni became a hands-on creative who was involved in almost everything Star Wars-related, garnering the title of Chief Creative Officer in 2023. However, there were a few notable exceptions to this rule; projects which saw little actual involvement from Filoni.
Among those projects were Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte, Tony Gilroy’s Andor, and the animated anthology series Star Wars: Visions. The latter of these was an especially notable exception, as it was the first animated Star Wars series in nearly twenty-years that had not been shepherded by Filoni in some way, shape, or form. And according to a new report by The Wrap, this was something he was not a fan of, as an anonymous Lucasfilm insider told the outlet that Filoni "wasn't keen on Star Wars: Visions." It matches a similar report the outlet published which stated that Filoni didn't like Tony Gilroy's Andor either, a claim Lucasfilm has since refuted as inaccurate.
Dave Filoni actually got his start with Lucasfilm in animation, and has remained an essential part of Star Wars’ use of that medium ever since. Filoni first got involved with Star Wars shortly after the release of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith in 2005, when George Lucas sought him out to help co-create an animated series chronicling the years between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.
The resulting series was Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which ran for several years before being unceremoniously cancelled when Lucasfilm was acquired by the Disney Corporation in 2012. However, even after the acquisition, Filoni was kept onboard, instead being tasked with running a different animated series, Star Wars Rebels. This success of this series would go on to fortify Filoni’s reputation within the new iteration of the company, leading to him not only guiding other animated shows to fruition (Star Wars: Resistance, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and even a final season for Star Wars: The Clone Wars) but also making the jump to live-action television (The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahoska).
Amidst all of this, Star Wars: Visions debuted in 2021 and became the only animated series in the line-up without Filoni’s involvement. This was very much by design, as the entire hook of Visions was to allow different animation houses to come in and deliver standalone episodes of animated Star Wars mayhem that were exempt from the confines of the franchise’s larger canon. In this way, Visions embraces the medium of animation in a way that Filoni’s shows never have. While many of Filoni’s animated series’ (especially Rebels and Bad Batch) are great, they never feel like they exist in animation because it is the medium that best suits them; it’s merely because making it in live-action would prove too costly or inefficient. In stark contrast, the majority of episodes of Visions treat animation as a bona fide art-form unto itself, and are exploring unique corners of the Star Wars galaxy that best suit the craft of that medium.
Thus, to hear that Filoni isn’t a fan of Star Wars: Visions is extremely disheartening, not just because it’s a great show in and of itself, but also because of what it represents. If these reports are true, and Andor and Visions are the examples of what Filoni is looking to avoid making more of in the future, that presents a very disheartening portrait of what the galaxy far, far away may soon look like.