The LA Olympics opening ceremony is about to get the Star Wars sequel trilogy treatment

LA28 announced on October 28 that Kathleen Kennedy is now head of ceremonies and content for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. She takes over from Peter Rice, who started as Netflix's content chief two days before the announcement and will stay on as an executive producer of the opening and closing ceremonies, working both jobs.

The assignment itself is enormous. The Games run July 14–30, 2028 — the first American summer Olympics since Atlanta 1996 — with the opening ceremony at SoFi Stadium and the closing at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. LA28 chair Casey Wasserman introduced her the way you'd expect:

"A legend" with "a rare gift for storytelling."

— Casey Wasserman, LA28 chairman, in the announcement

On paper, no producer alive is more qualified to stage two hours of American spectacle. Kennedy co-founded Amblin with Spielberg and Frank Marshall in 1981 and produced E.T., Jurassic Park, the Back to the Future trilogy and Indiana Jones films — the exact iconography an LA ceremony will be built from. She and Marshall have attended nearly every Games since 1984, so this is also a fan getting the keys to the stadium.

None of that is what her name means online, and that's the problem the announcement just installed into the Olympics.

The fourteen years that ate the forty

Kennedy stepped down from Lucasfilm in January 2026 after running it for 13 years, since Disney's $4.05 billion purchase in 2012. By the numbers she won: over $5.6 billion at the box office, The Force Awakens past $2 billion, The Mandalorian and Andor carrying Disney+.

The fandom's ledger reads differently, and it's the one with the memes:

• The Last Jedi (2017): the most divisive Star Wars film ever made, a fight that still hasn't ended nine years later.
• Solo (2018): directors fired mid-shoot, Ron Howard brought in to finish.
• The Rise of Skywalker (2019): panned by critics and fans alike, home of "Somehow Palpatine returned" — the line the sequels will never live down.
• The Ben Solo affair: Adam Driver said a film he developed with Soderbergh, backed by Kennedy, was killed by Bob Iger — and fans flew a protest banner over Disney's Burbank lot.

A decade of this turned Kennedy into something no previous ceremony chief has been: a person with an organized, meme-fluent opposition that predates the job. The caption writes itself — "Somehow Kennedy returned" — and it will be attached to every drone mishap, every pacing lull, every stylistic choice at SoFi, because an Olympic opening ceremony is judged live by the largest second-screen audience on Earth.

Kennedy produced the films an LA ceremony will quote. She also produced the films the audience will quote back at her.

Who actually builds the show

Worth separating the lightning rod from the stage. Kennedy's post is the top creative-oversight job, not the director's chair:

• Kathleen Kennedy — head of ceremonies and content, the role Rice vacated.
• Peter Rice — executive producer of the opener and closer, now simultaneously running Netflix's content operation.
• Ben Winston — executive producer and creative director, the hands-on showman.
• Scott Givens — executive producer of production, with FulFive (the new Fulwell Entertainment–FiveCurrents merger) producing.

So the night's actual texture belongs as much to Winston as to Kennedy. That distinction will matter to approximately no one once the broadcast starts, because fandom wars don't read org charts — they read names, and hers is the famous one.

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There is a version of July 14, 2028 where this becomes the redemption arc: the woman who ran Star Wars through its angriest decade stages the best American ceremony since 1984 with the Amblin songbook, and the discourse finally has to update. Paris set the bar brutally high in 2024, the whole world will be comparing in real time, and Kennedy has spent 45 years producing exactly this kind of scale. She's earned the shot. She's just the first person in Olympic history who'll take it with a fandom already in the stands.

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