Star Wars: Oscar Winning Editor Marcia Lucas Says J.J. Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy “Don’t Get It”

Marcia Lucas wants you to know she doesn’t care for Disney’s Star Wars sequels in the slightest. The Oscar-winning film editor spoke at length against the sequel trilogy in JW Rinzler’s Howard Kazanjian: A Producer’s Life, even going the length to say filmmaker JJ Abrams and Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy “don’t know what they’re doing.”

“I like Kathleen. I always liked her. She was full of beans. She was really smart and really bright. Really wonderful woman. And I liked her husband, Frank. I liked them a lot. Now that she’s running Lucasfilm and making movies, it seems to me that Kathy Kennedy and J.J. Abrams don’t have a clue about Star Wars,” an excerpt of the book reads. “They don’t get it. And JJ Abrams is writing these stories — when I saw that movie where they kill Han Solo, I was furious. I was furious when they killed Han Solo. Absolutely, positively there was no rhyme or reason to it. I thought, You don’t get the Jedi story. You don’t get the magic of Star Wars. You’re getting rid of Han Solo?”

Lucas, the ex-wife of Star Wars creator George Lucas, won an Academy Award for editing the original Star Wars film. She was nominated for another Academy Award for her work on American Grafitti and won a BAFTA for editing Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

More specifically, Lucas went on to rail against how Luke Skywalker (Mark Hammill) was treated in The Last Jedi, a movie written and directed by Rian Johnson.

“They have Luke disintegrate. They killed Han Solo. They killed Luke Skywalker. And they don’t have Princess Leia anymore. And they’re spitting out movies every year,” the retired filmmaker added. “And they think it’s important to appeal to a woman’s audience, so now their main character is this female, who’s supposed to have Jedi powers, but we don’t know how she got Jedi powers, or who she is. It sucks. The storylines are terrible. Just terrible. Awful. You can quote me…JJ Abrams, Kathy Kennedy — talk to me.’”

The next Star Wars project due out is The Book of Boba Fett, set to hit Disney+ this December.

Cover photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images