Bob Chapek’s costly parks expansion, a bad bet on fans with money to burn, goes down as one of the company’s biggest blunders ever
Just as fast as it materialized, Disney’s “Star Wars”-themed hotel, the Galactic Starcruiser, went belly up in one of the company’s biggest busts in recent memory, the nearly $1 billion resort unceremoniously shut down by the entertainment giant less than a week ago. The relatively straightforward idea for an ultra-themed hotel wound up — thanks to a combination of hubris, mismanagement and greed — as perhaps the greatest Disney theme park disaster ever.
The 100-room resort, which one ex-Imagineer estimated cost the company more than $1 billion, was supposed to be the next big thing for Disney’s theme parks, an interactive and wholly immersive experience, built around a traditional hotel but including elements of live-action role-playing, improvisational theater and more common theme-park mechanics.
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The Starcruiser was purposefully designed to push the boundaries of what a Disney vacation could be, thanks to its cutting-edge technology, emphasis on play and truly eye-watering price point, costing about $1,600 per person for a two-night “voyage.” It opened last spring to a flood of hype and rave reviews: The Los Angeles Times said it could “revolutionize how we vacation.” But late last week, the company announced that it would be shuttering the bespoke experience for good.
It was so abrupt that the cast members who worked at the operation didn’t know about the closure until the news broke, which was purposefully sandwiched between Disney’s declaration that it was pulling out of a costly relocation of thousands of jobs to Florida and the first reviews of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” out of Cannes.
What Disney will do with the building or any elements from the experience remains a mystery. But as to the question of what brought the starship hotel to a screeching halt, insiders have given TheWrap some answers.
But first, let’s start at the beginning…
Starcruiser origins
The idea for a highly themed Disney hotel experience dates to at least the early 1990s when Walt Disney Imagineers plotted a haunted hotel that you could actually stay in. Ghosts would have appeared in your mirrors, spooky sounds would echo down the hallway.
While the haunted hotel idea went away, the concept of immersing guests in a one-of-a-kind experience remained. After all, it’s not that far removed from the already highly themed hotels that Walt Disney World is known for — places that whisk you away to an oceanic paradise or turn-of-the-century stateliness.
Disney wasn’t the only company exploring such concepts. According to theme park historian Jim Hill, Warner Bros. had looked at acquiring a parcel of land in the English countryside for what he describes as “the ultimate ‘Harry Potter’-themed experience.”
“You boarded the Hogwarts Express, crossed the Black Lake and when you got there were sorted into houses,” Hill said. There was even going to be an animatronic version of Fluffy, the three-headed dog. While there isn’t a “Harry Potter” reader or watcher who hasn’t wondered what it’d be like to actually attend Hogwarts, Warner Bros. couldn’t be convinced that the rewards outweighed the risks. The project was canceled.
But Disney didn’t give up. In 2017, the company quietly started asking guests if they would be interested in a “Star Wars” hotel experience. Details from these original polls are eerily similar to what was eventually made, and the polls shared concept art that was quickly leaked. That indicated plans had been in the works for a while and the polls were the last push the company needed to finally turn the key.
The two-night “voyage,” the exclusive access to the then-unnamed “Star Wars”-themed land and the idea of a robot “butler” (later reduced to a kind of in-room virtual assistant) were all there, along with things that didn’t make the Galactic Starcruiser’s final cut. In one early version of the Starcruiser, some of the rooms would have actually looked out onto the pool. The final version of the hotel doesn’t have a single window.
Later in 2017, at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, Disney officially unveiled the concept, which was being overseen by Scott Trowbridge, a Walt Disney Imagineer in charge of the “Star Wars” portfolio. Disney had poached Trowbridge after he contributed to Universal’s Harry Potter project.
Disney said it would be an adventure that lasts “every minute” you’re on board the starship (then unnamed, it would later be christened the Halcyon). At the D23 Expo in 2019, more details emerged: lightsaber training, a packed lobby (complete with Chewbacca) and an exclusive “port day” at Batuu, the planet that houses Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the “Star Wars”-themed land.
Bob Chapek, then chairman of Disney parks, experiences and products, announced at D23 that guests would “board and depart together.” Concrete details, however, were hard to come by, and some of the concept art was hard to gauge.
Soon, it became clear that Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser (as it was now known) would be a dumping ground for concepts and ideas developed for Galaxy’s Edge, the expansive “Star Wars” land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park, but cut at the last minute by Chapek in a dramatic, last-minute streamlining of the land.
These scrapped Galaxy’s Edge ideas included an intergalactic dinner show (in the land it was meant to be built behind Oga’s Cantina) and a number of stunt shows (next time you’re in Galaxy’s Edge, look up at all the loadbearing catwalks and rafters — these would have supported several different shows throughout the land).
Even the element of having a “reputation” that would follow you around the land was ported over to the Galactic Starcruiser, as cast members and characters you interact with would know what quest you were on (and whether you were a First Order or Resistance sympathizer). The Starcruiser eventually launched with 11 different storylines and three different narrative paths. In one, you have to orchestrate a jewel heist. In another, you help two characters fall in love.
While the opening of the hotel was pushed back due to the global pandemic, when Disney finally did start the promotional push, the campaign was rockier than a hurdling asteroid. By that time, Chapek had become CEO.
On Nov. 28, 2021, Disney shared a behind-the-scenes look at the Starcruiser on YouTube. By then the exorbitant prices had been revealed and those who saw the video voiced their complaints. The video showed singer Gaya, a major character onboard the Halcyon, but she wasn’t in the dining room where she actually sings. They put her in the much-smaller cantina. The response was so overwhelmingly negative that Disney did the unthinkable and removed the video.
As part of the marketing push, Lucasfilm and Disney began awkwardly inserting the Starcruiser into preexisting “Star Wars” mythology, suggesting that Anakin and Padme took their honeymoon on the Halcyon (in a comic book called “Star Wars: Halycon Legacy”), implying that this was where Luke and Leia were conceived. (The Galactic Starcruiser, like Galaxy’s Edge, is wedged into a specific point in the “Star Wars” timeline, in between “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”)
Disney constantly struggled with describing what the experience actually was, a problem that plagued the project from the very beginning, making the message of why you should spend thousands of dollars on said experience even more difficult.
At the time of the Galactic Starcruiser’s development, Chapek was becoming increasingly obsessed with wooing the uber-wealthy and making sure that everything at a Disney theme park came with an accompanying surcharge. When the parks reopened after COVID, gone was the free FastPass system, replaced by a cumbersome app called Genie+ and an a la carte ride-skipping option called Lightning Lane.
The Starcruiser falls apart
Initially, the Galactic Starcruiser was off to a strong start, despite the iffy lead-up. The media blitz that accompanied the experience’s opening last spring led to strong word of mouth (the Los Angeles Times said that it was “arguably the most ambitious tourism project undertaken by the Walt Disney Company since the creation of the original Disneyland”). All 100 rooms were regularly booked.
Prior to the Galactic Starcruiser’s opening, this reporter attended a day-long, truncated version of the experience and was genuinely dazzled by the dinner show, the interaction with characters, the big, climactic lightsaber duel. It was breathlessly paced and super-immersive.
But a year after the Starcruiser had opened, demand for the “Star Wars” hotel had all but dried up. Heavy discounts were being offered to cast members and those who were part of the Disney Vacation Club, Disney’s members-only timeshare product. The number of “voyages” was reduced, with some canceled outright. The dinner show went from twice a night to one sitting (and that was, according to someone who visited the Starcruiser in March, sparsely attended).
“Once you went through the one-percenters who could afford it and the fanatical ‘Star Wars’ fans who would sell their mother to do it, you were done,” a Disney insider told TheWrap.
“Disney treated it as the rest of the theme parks, encouraging people to take photos, videos, vlogs — for the people who went, they would have to shield themselves from the media output. You’re paying a lot of money for something you can view virtually,” said Kevin Perjurer, the man behind the popular YouTube channel Defunctland and the world’s leading Disney documentarian. “There’s no mystery.”
In some ways, Perjurer said, “You could experience more virtually than you could in person.”
One YouTuber who paid for the experience, Jenny Nicholson, had a truly miserable time and hilariously documented her experience for her 1 million subscribers, including how she was stuck behind a pole for the dinner show. “I can’t even be like ‘Good thing I saw it before they got rid of it.’ I didn’t see anything!!!” she tweeted after the news of the hotel’s closure broke.
Behind the scenes, Disney toiled to find a workable solution. Could they offer “tours” of the facilities, with access to the bar, the dinner show and the gift shop, for those already staying at Walt Disney World? The charge could be $50 or $100 per person. Another option recently emerged according to Hill: retheme the entire hotel to the popular Disney+ “Star Wars” streaming series “The Mandalorian.” Reports have since emerged that Imagineers were at the Starcruiser as recently as last week, looking at ways they could retrofit or change the experience.
Ultimately, it was Bob Iger who decided to shut these plans down. It was one more problem the two-time Disney CEO inherited from Chapek, his hand-picked successor, whom he replaced in November.
A Disney representative didn’t respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Even on a practical level, these alternate ideas simply wouldn’t work. The Starcruiser is housed in a blank gray building south of Disney’s Hollywood Studios in a cast-members-only area. The building itself looks more like a Stalinist record depot than a spot of whimsical merriment. And it’s not exactly walkable.
The closing date for the Starcruiser is late September, days before the close of fiscal 2023. Disney Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro said during the JP Morgan Global Technology, Media & Communications Conference Monday that the company expected to take a $150 million write-down per quarter until then, suggesting that by October the crash of the Starcruiser could add up to a $300 million writedown, easily putting the project as one of the costliest Disney Parks blunders ever.
What now?
Searching for a comparable Disney disaster, you could look to the troubled openings of the Euro Disney project (later renamed Disneyland Paris) and Disney California Adventure. But both were eventually profitable, and neither one was completely shuttered. There was the Disney Institute, which offered informative and educational classes (categories included “animation,” “culinary” and “the great outdoors”). It wasn’t a success, but it limped along for a little while. When it closed, the space was reused for an actual hotel.
Another bust was DisneyQuest, a plan for standalone Disney-themed arcades that started in Florida and were meant to spread nationwide (only a single other location, in Chicago, ever opened). And while that concept never caught on, the original arcade lasted in Walt Disney World for nearly 20 years.
Perjurer points to the NBA Experience, the replacement for DisneyQuest in Walt Disney World, as the closest thing, historically, to the Galactic Starcruiser.
The NBA Experience was located in the former DisneyQuest space, part of Disney Springs, the heavily themed retail and dining area of Walt Disney World. It opened in August 2019. Then it closed during the pandemic and just never reopened.
“The NBA Experience represented Iger’s tenure in a similar way that the Starcruiser represented Chapek’s,” Perjurer said. “Iger was an NBA fan and there were rumors he was going to buy a team. The NBA Experience didn’t hit in the same way.”
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The entire Galactic Starcruiser experience, to Perjurer, misunderstood what makes Disney so special, starting with its limited capacity. In his rough calculation, the same number of people who stayed in the Galactic Starcruiser in a year could visit the Magic Kingdom in just one day.
Perjurer conceded that some elements of the Starcruiser could escape back to Galaxy’s Edge, like the stunt show and a few of the walk-around characters. But he wondered if any of these elements would resonate with regular guests, outside of the hermetically sealed world of the Halcyon. What is Gaya without her dinner show?
“No one connected to this came off well,” said one Disney insider. That’s an understatement of galactic proportions.
Drew Taylor
Drew Taylor is a reporter at TheWrap. Before joining the organization in 2021, Drew was a freelance film journalist with a keen interest in animation and Disney history. Drew has been covering film, television and theme parks for 15 years. He has written for the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Time Out New York, Collider, The Playlist, Polygon, Vulture, Box Office Magazine, AOL Travel and Syfy. He was the executive editor and social media manager for Moviefone before it was purchased by MoviePass. Additionally, Drew co-created and co-hosts “Light the Fuse,” a weekly podcast dedicated to the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise that recently celebrated its 200th episode milestone. He also authored the book “The Art of Onward,” about the making of Pixar’s 2020 fantasy film, and provided liner notes for several Mondo vinyl releases for Pixar features (“Up,” “Coco” and “Lightyear”).