Star Wars fans were welcomed to a new year in 2026 with a long awaited announcement: Kathleen Kennedy will be stepping down as president of Lucasfilm. She will be replaced by a co-presidency with Lynwen Brennan overseeing business strategy and Dave Filoni overseeing creative strategy, an expansion of his previous role as Chief Creative Officer. For the uninitiated, or those under the proverbial rock, Kennedy was bequeathed the helm of Lucasfilm after the landmark sale of the studio to Disney in 2012. Not only has she been a Hollywood mainstay the past several decades, she has also been a long time friend and collaborator of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Simply put - she knows Hollywood.
Despite Kennedy’s apt understanding and experience in the industry, her disconnect from the Star Wars franchise showed just months after she took command of the studio. In March 2013, Lucasfilm announced the cancellation of beloved animated show the Clone Wars. While the show would live on in a spiritual successor Rebels and would see a revival for the final seventh season in 2020, the Clone Wars cancellation was a sign of things to come under the new regime at Lucasfilm.
In April 2013, Lucasfilm announced that the long-time video game development arm of the studio LucasArts would close its doors and relinquish development rights to Electronic Arts. Gamers and fans alike would see a dramatic decrease in both quantity and quality of Star Wars games over the next decade. You can read more about the history of Star Wars gaming since then here.
Perhaps most egregiously, just a yeae after LucasArts’ closure, Lucasfilm announced that the Expanded Universe - decades of supplementary material including thousands of books, comics, games, to the franchise and lore - would be officially reclassified as “Legends.” To many fans, it would be as if, canonically, countless beloved stories, characters, and arcs never happened in the galaxy far, far away.
This reclassification has since caused irreparable damage to the fandom and birthed a schism that exists to this day. Fans continue to argue whether or not the “Disney canon” is true canon and that the old EU is the true record of events in the galaxy. The beleaguered fanbase was once again insulted when Kennedy doubled down on the Legends reclassification in 2019 to Rolling Stone stating that “There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don't have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate story tellers ….”
While this reclassification and disregard for decades of amazing stories and characters is subjectively a poor decision, it makes sense logically and narratively. From a business standpoint, it makes sense to usher in a new era with a clean slate to allow maximum creative freedom. Despite this logic, it does seem over a decade after the dice were rolled that the gamble has not paid off - many aspects from Legends were canonized anyway to varying success(looking at you Thrawn and Boba Fett).
Another possible justification, and where I personally fall in the great canon debate, lies in the very structure of the franchise. We must first look at what a “legend” is - a story coming down from the past, especially one popularly regarded as historical although not verifiable. The very first thing an audience member sees in (almost) every Star Wars film is the iconic blue text - “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” The iconic tagline suggests what we’re about to witness, like a legend, is a historical record passed down through the ages. Also like a legend - not historically verifiable. With this definition and framing in mind, it can be thought that certain aspects of the EU could very well have happened, but nobody really knows if it did.
This is further reasonable when we notice that many aspects of the EU extend thousands of years to the past and hundreds of years into the future. Like with actual history here on Earth, there’s plenty of history from thousands of years ago, even a few hundred years ago, there are plenty of accounts that are debated. If we immerse ourselves into the narrative and lore, we can still enjoy aspects of the EU as canon if we want, because to the citizens of the galaxy, much of what is now classified as Legends are exactly that - legends.
Fans still enjoy Legends content. KOTOR is still regarded as some of the best storytelling in Star Wars. As elusive as it has been, KOTOR is still slated for a bona-fide remake at some point, and if court documents are anything to go off of the same can be said for its legendary (wink wink) sequel. KOTOR love is so alive and well that Fate of the Old Republic, a spiritual successor, was announced just last year. KOTOR love is just a very small example of how much fans are still enjoying Legends content.
Of course, all Legends content is still available and accessible, though with an added Legends banner to delineate from canon. Nobody is saying the content isn’t good, or that you can’t enjoy it, but like an actual legend in our world, they can still be considered as such literally in the narrative of Star Wars. Disney canon is canon. That may be to your chagrin, it may not be. But the point stands that you can still enjoy Star Wars without someone telling you what is and isn’t “real,” because the simple fact is that Star Wars can be considered a legend of sorts as we pass it down to each generation and to those around us.