'Star Wars' Producer Kathleen Kennedy Will Run L.A.'s Olympic Ceremonies

She replaces Netflix-bound Peter Rice as LA28's head of ceremonies and content, steering four Olympic and Paralympic shows.

Kathleen Kennedy and her husband, producer Frank Marshall, have gone to virtually every Olympic Games since Los Angeles last hosted, in 1984. When L.A. hosts again, she's the one deciding how it opens and closes.

On Wednesday, the 2028 organizing committee named Kennedy its head of ceremonies and content, the Los Angeles Times reported. She's the producer behind "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and "Jurassic Park," and she ran Lucasfilm and Star Wars for 14 years before stepping down in January. She takes over from Peter Rice, the former president of 21st Century Fox, who just became Netflix's chief content officer.

The job is four shows, according to LA28's announcement as The Hollywood Reporter laid it out. The Olympics open July 14, 2028, with a ceremony split between the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park and SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, and they close July 30. The Paralympics open Aug. 15 and close at the Coliseum on Aug. 27.

She isn't starting from a blank page. Rice is staying on as an executive producer. Two more names are already on the masthead: creative director Ben Winston, who's also an executive producer, and Scott Givens, who has produced Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies before and now runs the production side as its executive producer. FulFive, a new company made up of Fulwell Entertainment and FiveCurrents, is supporting the production, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The handoff came fast. Deadline reported that the announcement landed two days after Rice officially started at Netflix, and that the Games and LA28 chair Casey Wasserman are facing growing scrutiny over costs. Wasserman called Kennedy "a legend" in the announcement. Back in 2025, he told The Hollywood Reporter that Rice was his first choice, and that L.A. had "better knock people's socks off."

The Olympics are close to a family business for her. Kennedy produced "Olympic Glory," a short documentary about the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, and Marshall received an Olympic Shield in 2005 for serving more than a decade on the U.S. Olympic Committee's executive committee, The Hollywood Reporter reported. "The Olympics have been a touchstone in my life," Kennedy said in LA28's announcement.

Her toughest note may be one she's already given herself. Talking about Star Wars at Bloomberg's Screentime conference in Los Angeles, she said that when something has meant a lot to people for decades, "the challenge is to try to create something new, something original," according to The Hollywood Reporter. The city that last threw this party in 1984 now has her working on the sequel.

Source: Los Angeles Times, retrieved October 28, 2026. Other sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline.