The reportedly outgoing Lucasfilm president has brought a raft of new movies to the sci-fi franchise but some plans have crashed and the narrative has the look of random splashing

If the reports are true, and Kathleen Kennedy is to step down as president of Lucasfilm, it is possible to look back on her near 13-year reign over the Star Wars movies and wonder how one person managed to oversee an entire industry of sci-fi fantasy dreams, decrees and doomed announcements that always seemed to fall apart as quickly as they were constructed. Like any of the Death Stars that have permeated these films, Kennedy’s apparently well-constructed visions for future episodes always seemed to be blown to smithereens just as they were about to take over the Hollywood nebula. From Josh Trank’s mysteriously vanished Boba Fett film to Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron crash-landing before takeoff, her time at the helm of Lucasfilm will be marked by vast, ambitious projects that promised to be “fully operational” – only for the scrappy reality of budget concerns and creative differences to transform them into little more than unfinished, floating chunks of cinematic debris, drifting aimlessly through the void.

It is fair to say that while her predecessor George Lucas procrastinated, toiled, and employed as much energy as a protocol droid attempting to jog through quicksand, Kennedy, in terms of bringing new Star Wars films to the multiplexes (after the mixed reception to his midichlorian-infested, blue-screen-heavy prequel trilogy), moved like a hyperspace-jumping Millennium Falcon. Initially at least: no sooner had the ink dried on Disney’s galactically ambitious purchase of Lucasfilm for a $4.5bn (£2.5bn) in 2012 than Kennedy was off hunting down JJ Abrams to oversee 2015’s The Force Awakens. It was a movie that – at the time – felt as if fans of the saga had finally been gifted a return to the knockabout space romps of Lucas’s original trilogy – but these days it feels like a gleaming hyperspace lane to nowhere: a void at the heart of everything that is wrong about modern-day Star Wars.