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Credit: DisneyThe Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser resort is one of the Walt Disney Company’s biggest and most embarrassing failures, and the experts have revealed why.
Walt Disney World’s Galactic Starcruiser was opened to great fanfare in 2022, and barely more than a year later, the immersive role-playing hotel is shutting down. It has been estimated to have cost the House of Mouse as much as $250 million after years of development and will almost certainly go down in Disney Park history as a shockingly terrible crash-and-burn.
Galactic Starcruiser was first conceptualized in 2017 as a Star Wars-themed hotel, but the idea quickly grew from there.
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Rather than a traditional Disney World hotel that simply featured the iconography of a franchise via Mickey Mouse pancakes and themed rooms, Galactic Starcruiser was developed as an immersive experience. Guests stayed for two nights in a choose-your-own-adventure style RPG in which employees costumed as stormtroopers, droids, and various intergalactic scum guided them along free-form narratives.
Guests could build their own lightsabers, meet Rey, Kylo Ren, C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chewbacca, and even eat elaborate Star Wars conceptual food. In theory, all of this should have been catnip for Star Wars fans who wanted a deeper experience than the Galaxy’s Edge areas at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
So what went wrong? According to former Disney Imagineers Ryan Harmon and Joe Lanzisero, the House of Mouse wildly overestimated how much they could charge the relatively small number of dedicated Star Wars fans who would visit.
Harmon says (via News 6), “They created an experience that only can host up to (about) 400 guests… When you have that few guests, you cannot operate with a large staff because those people cost a lot of money, and the concept they developed is very heavy on employees — employees who wear costumes and are part of the story.”
That does seem to have been a feature and a bug at the same time. The exclusivity of the Galactic Starcruiser was part of its appeal, but at the same time, having a relatively small amount of Guests at any time also inherently limited the income flow of the Disney resort.
Harmon continued, “It’s really hard nowadays to justify spending anywhere near $1,000 to $2,000 a night to stay in what’s not even a very nice hotel to be part of the story,” Harmon said. “It’s just, it’s beyond people’s reach, I think, especially during the pandemic.”
Reportedly, the Galactic Starcruiser could cost as much as $5000 for a two-day stay.
Related: Marvel Multiverse Could Replace Galactic Starcruiser
Harmon’s colleague Joe Lanzisero also blamed Disney’s decision to focus on the modern Star Wars stories rather than the original films. He said, “So many people have that idea of the Star Wars universe that was formed by those earlier films. And I think we’ve had kind of an oversight on Disney’s part not to let people spend more time in those worlds, choosing those worlds from the earlier films and those characters from the earlier films.”
Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser will officially shut down on September 30. RIP, Starcruiser.
What went wrong with the Galactic Starcruiser? Can Walt Disney World bear that kind of financial loss? Let us know in the comments below!