LA28 names Kathleen Kennedy to lead Olympic ceremonies, replacing Peter Rice

LA28, the organizing committee for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games, announced Wednesday that producer Kathleen Kennedy will take over as head of ceremonies and content, succeeding Peter Rice. The move was confirmed in an official LA28 release and reported independently by Deadline and the Hollywood Reporter.

Kennedy will serve as executive producer of all four ceremonies — the Olympic opening and closing and the Paralympic opening and closing — in an appointment announced by LA28 chairman and president Casey Wasserman. Rice is not exiting the project entirely. According to LA28, he will remain attached as an executive producer even as he starts a new job running content at Netflix.

A reshuffled chain of command

The change comes nine days after Netflix named Rice its chief content officer, replacing Bela Bajaria, who departed after nearly a decade at the company. Netflix's own announcement, posted to its newsroom, said Rice would oversee the streamer's global slate of scripted and unscripted series, film and live events across all territories, effective October 26.

Rice had been LA28's head of ceremonies and content since 2025, a role organizers created as part of a broader push to bring Hollywood production values to the Games. With Rice now also running content for one of the industry's largest employers, LA28 opted to install Kennedy as the day-to-day lead while keeping him involved as an executive producer, a structure LA28's release frames as continuity rather than a clean break.

From a galaxy far, far away to the Coliseum

Kennedy spent 14 years as president of Lucasfilm, a tenure that ended in January when Disney confirmed she was stepping down; Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan were named to succeed her atop the Star Wars operation. She has continued producing for the studio, including the upcoming "The Mandalorian and Grogu," while returning to the full-time producing work she did for decades before taking the Lucasfilm job.

Her new assignment draws on a résumé LA28 describes as having generated 120 Academy Award nominations and 25 wins across more than 70 feature films, with Kennedy herself an eight-time Oscar nominee. She has producing credits stretching back to the early 1980s, including "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises, "Lincoln" and "The Sixth Sense," and she runs the Kennedy/Marshall Company with her husband, Frank Marshall, with whom she co-founded Amblin Entertainment alongside Steven Spielberg.

LA28's announcement also leans on a biographical detail with more direct bearing on the job: Kennedy and Marshall have attended nearly every Olympic Games since the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and Kennedy produced a short documentary about the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. Marshall received an Olympic Shield in 2005 and sat on the U.S. Olympic Committee's executive committee for more than a decade.

"Kathleen is a legend. She is one of Hollywood's all-time greats, with a rare gift for storytelling," Wasserman said in the LA28 release announcing the appointment.

Who else is building the ceremonies

Kennedy joins a production team LA28 built out over the past year. Ben Winston remains executive producer and creative director, a role LA28 confirmed when it named the ceremonies' production team last October. Scott Givens, a veteran producer of past Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, serves as executive producer of production, with physical production support from FulFive, a venture combining Fulwell Entertainment and FiveCurrents.

The venues were set in an earlier LA28 announcement: the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and SoFi Stadium will host the Olympic ceremonies, in what organizers described as the first dual-venue opening ceremony in Olympic history. The Olympic Games open July 14, 2028, and close July 30; the Paralympic Games open August 15 and close August 27 at the Coliseum.

What's next

For Kennedy, the appointment means stepping from the production of blockbuster franchises into an assignment with a fixed, unmovable deadline. In the release, she credited Wasserman's "bold vision" for the Games and said the Olympics "have been a touchstone" in her life, pointing to the decades she and Marshall have spent attending them. For Rice, the arrangement means juggling two high-profile jobs at once: full operating responsibility for Netflix's content pipeline, alongside a reduced but ongoing producing role on what LA28 is positioning as a showcase moment for the city.