How New Lucasfilm Leadership Could Shift Hollywood’s Portrayal of Empires and Criminal Networks

Why this matters: if you’ve tired of surface-level takes on power and crime, listen up

Fans and critics alike complain that big-plate franchise coverage either flatters spectacle or skewers it with lazy moralizing. You want context, not clickbait: clear readings of how power works on-screen, rooted in history, craft and storytelling choices. That’s why Dave Filoni’s elevation to Lucasfilm’s creative lead at the start of 2026 is significant beyond fandom chatter. His appointment signals a potential, structural shift in how Star Wars handles empire, power, and the informal networks—smugglers, syndicates, warlords—that sit between law and anarchy. And those changes will ripple into crime dramas that borrow imperial metaphors.

The headline: what changed in early 2026

In late 2025 and early 2026 the biggest behind-the-scenes story in franchise filmmaking crystallized: Kathleen Kennedy stepped down after 14 years, and Lucasfilm split leadership into two halves—Lynwen Brennan overseeing business operations and Dave Filoni as President and Chief Creative Officer. Filoni’s task is simple to describe and hard to understate: steward the creative heart of a universe that now spans animation, live-action, novels, comics and games.

“It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm,” Kathleen Kennedy said as she announced the transition—which will leave Filoni and Brennan running different dials on the same cultural machine.

What Filoni brings to the table

Experience matters. Filoni has been a company insider since 2005. He co-created and shepherded long-form animation like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Rebels, and helped define the tone of live-action expansions including The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. His creative signature is recognizable: intimate character study within epic, mythic frames; patience for serialized payoff; and an ethic of continuity that treats fans’ knowledge as part of storytelling capacity rather than a constraint.

Creative fingerprints: empathy, patchwork governance, and long arcs

Across Filoni’s work, three traits recur:

• Empathy for foot soldiers: even when he writes generals and senators, Filoni centers the people who enact policy—the pilots, officers, bounty hunters, and mechanics.
• Patchwork governance: his worlds emphasize fragmented power—city-states, crime families, ex-Imperial warlords—rather than single, totalizing rulers.
• Serial patience: arcs that take seasons—sometimes years—to culminate. This rewards audiences who track institutional change as much as personal change.

Case studies: how past shows preview a new treatment of empire

The Clone Wars and institutional rot

Far from a simple “Republic good vs. Sith evil” tale, Filoni’s Clone Wars dug into how institutions corrode from within—commissions, military expediency, and normalized violence. Episodes that focus on clones, civilians, and junior officers mapped how an ostensibly democratic system can produce imperial practices. That sensibility reframes empire not as a theatrical villain but as an emergent set of mechanisms: secrecy, plausible deniability, and delegation to intermediaries.

Rebels and insurgency as governance

Rebels treated rebellion as a governance problem: how does a decentralized insurgency provide justice, allocation of scarce resources, and moral leadership? Filoni’s interest in political improvisation—the way resistance groups become administrative actors—anticipates a Star Wars willing to show power’s messy middle rather than just binary oppositions.

The Mandalorian and the criminal ecosystem

The Mandalorian made the post-Imperial galaxy plausible by populating it with informal empires: syndicates, mercantile houses, and occupation-era collaborators who fill vacuums. This world treated crime networks as both economic engines and political actors, normalizing the idea that criminal organizations can be alternative governance structures when formal institutions fail.

How Filoni’s leadership could shift Star Wars’ portrayal of empires

Taken together, these tendencies suggest several shifts we should expect in Star Wars under Filoni’s creative direction:

• From monolith to mechanism: the Empire will be less a symbol and more a bundle of techniques—bureaucratic control, surveillance, economic strangulation, and local collaborators.
• Elevation of informal empires: Hutt-like cartels, corporate conglomerates, and networked syndicates will be portrayed as political actors with their own legitimacy and governance models.
• Focus on institutions over villains: stories will examine how institutions encourage criminalization and how resistance movements try (and fail) to replace administrative functions.
• Moral complexity: more narratives that refuse tidy redemption or condemnation—characters will inhabit grey zones created by survival, loyalty, and cultural legacy.

Why this matters narratively and culturally

These are not just aesthetic choices. They reshape how audiences understand power. When a franchise the size of Star Wars treats criminal networks as governing bodies, it normalizes a vocabulary that mainstream crime dramas already use—“empires,” “kingpins,” “fiefdoms”—but with a new emphasis on administration, logistics, and legitimacy. That move changes the moral texture of stories: the antagonist can be bureaucratic inertia as easily as a gun-slinging boss.

What this signals for crime dramas that borrow imperial metaphors

Crime dramas have long used imperial metaphors to compress stakes: Tony Soprano runs a “family empire”; Boardwalk Empire literalizes the phrase. Filoni’s Star Wars, by making the techniques of empire central, nudges crime storytelling toward technocratic realism. Expect three waves of influence.

Wave 1 — More institutional focus

Writers and showrunners will deepen focus on how criminal organizations administer territories: tax systems, arbitration, cartel-run schools or hospitals—details usually reserved for policy dramas. Story beats that once signaled “this person is powerful” (luxury, violence) will be complemented by scenes of governance: meetings about road maintenance, quota enforcement, or recruitment policies.

Wave 2 — Serialized, cross-platform worldbuilding

Filoni’s success using animation and live-action in conversation encourages crime creators to build universes rather than single shows. Expect spinoff mini-series, podcasts that function as in-world news outlets, graphic novels, and tie-in audiobooks that flesh out bureaucratic routines of empires and syndicates.

Wave 3 — Ethically mindful portrayal

Filoni’s humanist lens—sympathizing with foot soldiers while scrutinizing institutions—models a way to avoid glamorizing crime. Crime drama inspired by that approach will foreground victims, show the collateral governance effects of criminal empires, and interrogate why communities tolerate or resist illicit rule.

Actionable advice for creators and showrunners

If you’re a writer, producer, podcaster, or critic building narratives about empires—literal or metaphorical—here are practical steps to adapt the Filoni-inflected playbook:

1. Map the administration: treat criminal groups as municipal authorities. Create dossiers on how they handle justice, taxation, and services. These mundane details create believable power.
2. Center the intermediaries: write scenes from the perspective of clerks, mid-level enforcers, and logisticians. Their choices illuminate institutional incentives.
3. Use serialized stakes: plan arcs that reward patience. Institutional change is slow—let seasons reflect bureaucratic timelines (budgets, elections, purges).
4. Consult domain experts: criminologists, policy analysts, and historians can prevent accidental glamorization and offer realistic constraints for your fictional empires.
5. Design cross-platform artifacts: memos, propaganda broadcasts, and in-world podcasts deepen immersion and furnish critics with material to analyze institutional mechanics.
6. Center consequences over spectacle: show social costs—displacement, shadow economies, generational trauma—not just the cartel’s luxury or violence.

Actionable advice for critics, podcasters, and audiences

If your work is interpreting these shows, or you’re just a viewer who wants to parse empire narratives more rigorously, adopt these practices:

• Track institutions across episodes: keep a running list of in-universe offices, their budgets, and who they answer to. It reveals the real structure of power faster than isolated plot beats.
• Compare to real-world analogues: look for historical precedents—colonial administrations, cartel governance, privatized security—to ground analysis.
• Ask the ethical questions: who benefits from the story’s framing? Who is rendered invisible? How is violence contextualized?
• Build episode templates: for podcasters, construct segments that read diegetic artifacts (propaganda, court transcripts) and then bring in an expert to unpack them.

Suggested viewing and reading to trace the shift

To see where this change could go, run these cross-genre pairings:

• Star Wars (Filoni era shows) + The Wire — networked power and institutional incentives.
• Star Wars (Mandalorian/Ahsoka) + Boardwalk Empire — politics, patronage, and the legitimacy of illegal enterprises.
• Star Wars worldbuilding + Misha Glenny’s McMafia — the globalization of organized crime as administrative systems.

Predictions for 2026–2028: where this influence could go

Based on Filoni’s track record and industry trends entering 2026, here are concrete predictions:

1. More anti-binary storytelling: Star Wars projects will depict the collapse of Empire as complex governance transitions rather than simple liberation narratives.
2. Crime networks as world-building pillars: syndicates and merchant houses will receive multi-episode arcs explaining their social functions.
3. Cross-media governance catalogs: tie-in novels and podcasts will publish bureaucratic “files” (ledgers, memos) that inform main show beats.
4. Crime dramas borrow the archival approach: mainstream crime series will increasingly employ in-world documents and serialized evidence to build institutional critique.
5. Focus on reparative narratives: shows will more often explore restitution, reconciliation, and the institutional steps necessary to dismantle illicit rule.
6. Internationalization of genre: expect more global co-productions that reframe empires from non-Western perspectives—mirroring Star Wars’ growing diversity of creators and worlds.

Risks and ethical guardrails

Shifts in representation carry responsibilities. Two pitfalls to guard against:

• Naturalizing criminal rule: portraying illicit governance as simply efficient risks normalizing harm. Always depict social costs.
• Romanticizing violence: empathy for characters is not endorsement. Maintain narrative distance and contextual accountability.

Final takeaways: what audiences should watch for now

By 2026, Dave Filoni’s creative leadership at Lucasfilm marks a watershed moment—not because one show will change everything, but because the studio’s creative priorities will likely emphasize the mechanics of power and the people who live inside them. Expect Star Wars to become a laboratory for stories that treat empires as systems rather than caricatures, and expect crime dramas to import those design choices—more administration, more moral complexity, and more serialized payoff.

Quick checklist for spot-reading a Filoni-era empire story

• Are there scenes devoted to mundane governance (budgets, checkpoints, propaganda)?
• Do mid-level operatives get narrative weight?
• Is the audience given documentary-style artifacts that reveal institutional logic?
• Are victims’ experiences shown as part of the cost of governance?

Call to action

If you cover crime drama or planetary-scale storytelling, start tracking these features now. Subscribe to our newsletter for a monthly dossier on how Star Wars’ shifting rhetoric of empire is influencing crime narratives across TV, film, and podcasts. Pitch us your episode ideas or case studies—send a note describing a show, scene, or artifact you think deserves a Filoni-era reading. We’ll publish a reader-curated roundup each quarter.

Subscribe, share, and submit: help us build a smarter conversation about power on-screen—one that balances fascination with firm ethical analysis.

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