In January 2022 – just two months before it opened to the public – we asked Theme Park Tourist readers to “Place Your Bets” on whether Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser would be a blockbuster or a bust. No matter which side of the debate you “locked in” on, you probably didn’t expect to have an answer this soon. But it’s true: just 18 months after its debut, former CEO Bob Chapek‘s premium pet project will close forever after its last voyage returns on September 30, 2023.
The public never quite seemed to “get” the Starcruiser, whose experience (and pricing) was modeled after a cruise swirled with a low-capacity boutique theme park sprinkled with an escape room. The landlocked experience invited guests into one of 100 intentionally-compact “cabins” with screen-based “windows.” There, they set up camp for two nights’ accommodations, exploring the ship’s bridge, engine room, & chambers, engaging in app-based missions, enjoying all-inclusive dining and entertainment (including all-you-can-drink Blue Milk on tap), traveling to and from Batuu, and meeting-and-greeting Star Wars characters in the context of an immersive, multi-day story.
Though reviews from those who visited were glowing, fans suspected that it wouldn’t take long before Disney burned through the minuscule market where “Star Wars ultra-fans” and “People who can afford a $6,000, 2-night cruise” overlapped. And besides, in an era of slashed perks and new upcharges, the ultra-elite experience for the economic 1% read as a tone deaf “gatekeeping” of sought-after experiences. So it’s really no surprise that fans felt some schadenfreude seeing the Starcruiser’s bookings drop.
Announcing the Starcruiser’s sunsetting, Disney’s spokesperson acknowledged, “This premium, boutique experience gave us the opportunity to try new things on a smaller scale of 100 rooms, and as we prepare for its final voyage, we will take what we’ve learned to create future experiences that can reach more of our guests and fans.” So what do we hope Disney learned from this costly experiment? And where would we like to see its DNA live on?
LESSON 1: The problem was the price
It would be way, way too easy for Disney executives to decide “Well, the problem was that we didn’t have enough characters” or ‘it should’ve been three nights” or “the beds weren’t soft enough” or “it didn’t have windows.” So let’s make sure we’re clear about the first lesson Disney needs to learn – Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser was too expensive. Full stop.
Of course part of that was corporate greed – something Disney Parks fans are no strangers to. But frankly, it was also inherent in the formula. When Disney settled on 100 rooms for this boutique experience, they split the associated operational costs among a relatively small group of participants. If the hotel had 200 rooms and each cabin cost 30% less, the whole formula might’ve changed. Of course, that would also make it a less enjoyable experience in many ways, and less “premium” as well.
Disney’s statement suggests that they acknowledge that Starcruiser served as a small sample size prototype. Ultimately, that proved unsustainable. But before Disney can learn anything else from this experience, they have to learn that the primary problem was the price.
LESSON 2: Immersive doesn’t have to mean captive
One incredibly wrong message Disney could take from the Starcruiser’s grounding is that people just don’t want immersive experiences. That would be a very, very bad thing for them to decide. Ever since the Wizarding World opened at Universal Orlando in 2010, “immersive” has been the name of the game, with “Living Lands” across Disney and Universal parks that let guests step into the worlds they’ve seen on screen.
In many ways, Starcruiser represented an extreme of that; a 40 hour-long Star Wars themed escape room in which guests would (literally) eat, sleep, and breathe the Star Wars universe. The only peek into the outside world came from a visit to the “Climate Simulator” – an outdoor patio used for smoke breaks. The only real “break” from the fully-enclosed hotel was a truck ride to Disney’s Hollywood Studios (disguised as an interplanetary shuttle) to visit more Star Wars things, completing missions to recontextualize the goings-on of Batuu.
On one hand, it’s true that frankly, that’s a lot of Star Wars, leaving all but the most dedicated super-fans feeling that two days of role playing was more exhausting than exciting. But on the other hand, very few intellectual properties but Star Wars could maintain that level of fandom.
We did a little “Blue Sky” brainstorming about other immersive hotel experiences we’d love to see, and even with Starcruiser’s failure, they all still feel like great ideas! That’s because it’s hard to picture any of them being so rigidly programmed and obsessed with realism that they keep guests trapped. It’s almost like Disney did it just to prove they could… and maybe it was too much.
LESSON 3: Maybe Disney’s preferred Star Wars timeline needs to expand
Before Batuu was a sketch on a page, Disney famously drew up concepts for a Star Wars-themed land that would lean into the “Original Trilogy” – y’know, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, etc. However, once Disney put their “Sequel Trilogy” into production, the scale of the land grew, and its timeline leapt forward.
The timeline of Star Wars is studied with almost-academic precision, and in keeping with that tradition, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is firmly rooted on a single day set between Episode VIII and IX. Frankly, that kind of made sense when the movies were a thing happening in real time. But Disney’s Sequel Trilogy officially concluded in 2019 when Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker landed with a historic thud, leaving a bad taste in fans’ mouths for the adventures of Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo Ren.
The result is that Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and its E-Ticket rides are tethered to a corner of the Star Wars universe that doesn’t seem likely to be revisited anytime soon… Basing a permanent land off of the sequels to a beloved, classic film is already a bold move, but especially now that the future of Star Wars looks to be in the past (“The Mandalorian” is set closer to the Original Trilogy than the Sequel Trilogy), it’s beginning to look short-sighted…
Our guess has been that Disney recognizes their mistake, which is why they went with a very different model for Avengers Campus, and why characters from “The Mandalorian” and other Disney+ series have slipped into Batuu despite being anachronistic. Look: Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo Ren are compelling characters who will probably always be the stars of the land’s rides, and it’s probably true that in ten years, a generation raised on the Sequel Trilogy will grow into young adults eager to see those characters in Disney Parks. But on a larger scale, Disney probably does need to re-think its allegiance to its films and maybe do the impossible: admit that when people think Star Wars, they think of the Original Trilogy first, and probably always will.
While those are the three big lessons we hope Disney learns from the Starcruiser, we still have to talk about the places we hope we see its DNA pop up in the parks… Read on…
So where do we hope we’ll see the pieces of the Galactic Starcruiser show up? This is the easy part…
1. More entertainment in Batuu
Anyone who’s been following Disney Parks for the last half-decade can tell you that Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge doesn’t exactly feel the way fans were promised. In fact, one of the major selling points for this “Living Land” was that guests who visited Batuu would find themselves in market stalls run by alien merchants; bumping into free-roaming Droids traveling throughout the land; gazing up at actual ships landing and departing from Batuu; and yes, caught in high-energy stunt shows that would pop up around the land.
All of those promised experiences were present at the land’s celebrity-packed media preview, where Rey and Kylo Ren battled along embedded rooftop stages, ships flew over the land (using clever drone technology), and character interactions were plentiful… but on the first day that the land opened to guests, they’d all mysteriously vanished and have never returned.
Fans knew to place the blame on penny-pinching then-Parks Chairman Bob Chapek, who famously decided to cut the land’s entertainment budget and decided to staff the land’s shops with well-meaning Cast Members rather than union actors. But regardless of who’s at fault, anyone who’s visited Galaxy’s Edge will agree that the land is disappointingly lifeless. At best, Rey, Kylo Ren, Chewbacca, a pair of Stormtroopers, and a rotating cast of Disney+ characters can be found milling around, but they don’t really have anything to do.
And to add insult to injury, what did guests who forked over $6,000 for the Starcruiser experience find? Yep – Aliens! Droids! Ships! Battles! Given that Disney’s statement mentions, “we will take what we’ve learned to create future experiences that can reach more of our guests and fans,” we hope that the lesson is loud and clear here… and more to the point, that the immensely talented Cast Members who created such incredible moments on the Starcruiser will soon find themselves doing the same for the rest of us back on Batuu.
2. The long-awaited Star Wars restaurant
In another case of Disney over-promising and under-delivering, one of the explicitly-announced experiences planned for Galaxy’s Edge was a full service restaurant that would see guests choose between an elaborate galactic dining room with entertainment from visiting guest acts, or a sleazy underground nightclub of lounge singers. Concept art of the experience was widely shared by Disney. And of course, when the land opened, it was no where to be found.
Interesting, the physical space for the restaurant is literally there, right behind Oga’s Cantina and visible from satellite imagery. They just… y’know… didn’t build it. Which, again, would be fine except that they kinda did build it… but only for guests who paid $6,000.
In fact, the Starcruiser’s “Crown of Corellia” Dining Room was considered by many to be a highlight of the Starcruiser Experience, and like the formerly-flexible schedule of Be Our Guest Restaurant, could even shift from a less formal lunch to a moody dinner service with a performance by “intergalactic pop superstar” Gaya.
All throughout, guests dined on Star Wars foods like spiral dumplings, alien veggies, “bantha” tenderloin, fried “tip yip,” and of course, the legendary blue “Felucian shrimp.”
It’s depressing enough that a full service restaurant filled with Star Wars entertainment got cut from Galaxy’s Edge… but it’s salt in the wound to know that it existed aboard the Starcruiser, and that now, it’ll sit dark while the empty space back at Hollywood Studios just remains vacant. It would be great to see Disney port the idea over to the park, where we have no doubt that a prix fixe menu could earn them enough “credits” to make the move worthwhile.
3. Bolster Disney’s other “Living Lands”
If Galactic Starcruiser is best thought of as a small, controlled lab meant for prototyping new methods of interaction, then the best we can hope for is that the lessons learned there will translate throughout Disney’s other “Living Lands.”
It would be the best of a bad situation if the experimentation Imagineering accomplished with the Starcruiser was the first domino in a chain that will eventually see ACE naturalists and “living” Pandoran creatures interacting across The World of Avatar; interactive “missions” and explorable spaces dispatched throughout Avengers Campus; heck, even to get the “reputation” system built into Galaxy’s Edge to actually work, so that your performance on Smugglers Run, your choice of Droid, and your Lightsaber color actually have a meaning in the land.
It really wouldn’t be such a bad thing if some of the research & development money poured into the Galactic Starcruiser could now ripple outward, benefitting Disney’s projects well beyond Star Wars.
Lessons Learned & Ideas Grown
Let’s be honest – while fans are definitely owed some schadenfreude as they watch Bob Chapek’s ultra-elite, ultra-expensive, upcharge pet project fail to move forward, we should also acknowledge that the people who worked on Starcruiser – both in its design and its day-to-day operations – must be heartbroken right now.
So look at the bright side – hopefully, Disney really takes time to reflect and learns the right lessons from its grounding. Even better, hopefully we see the hard-won innovations and the guest-facing DNA of Starcruiser used to improve the experience for those of us who can’t drop $6,000 on a two night “cruise.”
