Jenny Nicholson has an interesting 4-hour video on the Star Wars hotel (officially, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser):

It’s an interesting and entertaining video on the rise and fall of Disney World’s star wars hotel. If you’re in the mood for that kind of thing, I recommend it. If this is too long for you, the tl;dw is that the Hotel opened in spring of 2022 as a Star Wars sequel trilogy themed LARP hotel where there’s a running story with actors who sometimes walk around the “ship” and you, in theory, get to take part in the story. It seems like the taking part in the story is mostly theoretical, much of it being done with dialog trees on an app where characters are texting you, and after a few successful months interest faded quickly and the hotel was shut down permanently in the fall of 2023.

I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the thing.

Galactic Starcruiser looks very much like an idea which was going to be super cool and somewhere about three quarters of the way through implementation Disney realized that they couldn’t do it, and so scrambled to come up with something that could plausibly be considered a version of what they promised. They had wanted an interactive story, and that is doable if you have something like a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests. That would be expensive, but Galactic Starcruiser was. It was roughly $3000 per person for two days and two nights; that’s inclusive of food but still in the right ballpark to pay for a 3:1 ratio of actors to guests.

But for whatever reason, they didn’t go that route. Maybe they ran afoul of occupancy limits, maybe they couldn’t reliably hire enough actors. Whatever the reason, they ended up going more in the direction of a 1:20 actors to guests ratio. At that kind of ratio, it’s not possible to have any kind of interactive story where most guests are more than just extras. “Come pay a lot of money to be an extra in a star wars story that only you see” is not really a promise of “live out your star wars story,” so they had to come up with something. Enter the app.

Disney World has an app for using the parks and this was extended with gameplay for Galactic Starcruiser. Human beings can’t meaningfully interact in a dramatic way with 200 people, but a computer can. Well, not meaningfully, but it can interact with them, anyway. And so all of the interactions which had consequences consisted of texting back and forth with characters in the app going along dialog trees and doing miscellaneous activities which can be supported on a pre-existing phone app such as scanning QR codes on crates, ostensibly to help the characters you’re texting with. Of course, since the actors aren’t going to do anything differently based on how around 200 people interacted with an app, the consequences of these actions were mostly limited to scheduling you to appear at various scenes that would happen throughout the “ship” at different times. The actors’ dialog would be set up to be as compatible as possible with people thinking that their actions had affected the story, but that can’t be very much, at least for people over 8 years old.

Curiously, Disney didn’t even really commit to this approach. Most of your immersive experience being on a screen isn’t wonderful, but they didn’t even give you an exotic screen from the hotel. They just had you use your own phone. So you spent $3000 to go to a hotel where much of your time was taken up staring at your phone. I like my phone but I don’t go on vacation to spend more time with it.

It would have been easy enough to provide the guests with tablets that had star-wars themed cases (that beige metal with rounded corners which screams Star Wars, for example). That wouldn’t be a huge improvement, but it would have been an improvement and would have given guests something in their hands which is in-character and special.

It also wouldn’t have been that hard to make a recombining branching storyline. You can’t make it branch based on individual actions, but you could based on cumulative actions. For example, you could have guests on the First Order side look for hidden contraband, and depending on how much they find the resistance would smuggle some or most through, and the characters may have to do something different if it’s only most of the contraband. You’d still go to the next major story beat no matter what, but how you get there would be different and people would feel that they contributed to the outcome, much in the way that individual soldiers contribute to victory in a battle.

I find it weird that Disney did none of this nor anything like it, and relied on generic, ambiguous dialog to allow people to persuade themselves that they did something if they’re inclined to do that.

This weird course change also explains some of the really strange things, like how the hotel was quite small and everyone was expected to play the game that existed. This is an absurd design, since with a 1:20 actor-to-guest ratio it’s necessarily not a good game. It would have made far more sense to have a much larger hotel, with more things to do such as a pool, an arcade, etc. which cost a lot less and participation in the actor-driven game was a significant up-charge. That would make the cost structure far more bearable, make the actor-to-playing-guest ratio much better, and also make it more fun since there would be people watching the people who paid extra. And the people watching wouldn’t feel left out because they know that the people who are participating in the storyline paid like three times what they did for their stay. Plus most people don’t actually want to LARP anyway. If I, for example, was forced to stay at a hotel like this, I’d pay an upcharge for some kind of badge to wear which made the actors leave me alone.

There’s another really curious issue: did anyone like the sequel trilogy well enough to spend money to have a vacation themed with it? (The fact that the hotel closed does suggest an answer is no.)

I have a hard time believing that anyone could, or that at any time the answer could plausibly have been yes. This isn’t just about the sequel trilogy having been really bad. I mean, that certainly didn’t help, but apart from that the sequel trilogy wasn’t even coherent.

I haven’t seen The Force Awakens but plot synopses make it clear that the main driver of its plot is the search for the map left by Luke Skywalker in case the galaxy should need him. The Last Jedi simply throws this out. Luke Skywalker is a depressed old loser, the Jedi are terrible and should die out, etc. Love it or hate it (and there’s something wrong with you if you love it), this story simply doesn’t go with the first one. Worse, by the end of the film it is clearly established that there is no hope left in the galaxy and the Resistance has been so destroyed that it now fits on a single small ship. If you like this tale of incompetence and defeat, I don’t see how you can also like The Force Awakens, which is a hopeful story about main characters who are at least competent and striving to make the world a better place with some success. Yes, it is normal for the second movie in a trilogy to be a setback for the heroes, but not for it to be a complete defeat, due in no small part to their radical incompetence. Those are just dissonant, unless you pay no attention.

Then we come to The Rise of Skywalker, which again throws out a bunch of stuff from the second movie. Luke Skywalker straight-up says that he was wrong about stuff he said in The Last Jedi, and the galaxy is established to not be hopeless, and the good guys win through gumption, courage, and competence. Oh, and while the second movie claimed that Rey was no one—gutter trash whose parents sold her for drinking money—The Rise of Skywalker establishes her as the granddaughter of the Emperor. Again, this is just dissonant with the second movie. It also has minimal continuity with The Force Awakens, though I am on shakier ground, there, since I didn’t see the first one and only read detailed plot synopses. There is the redemption of Kylo Ren, so admittedly that is one through-line in the two movies. Turning Rey into a Palpatine is absurd and quite at odds with the first movie, but then so is Palpatine being alive. Again, these movies don’t really go together unless you pay no attention.

And the problem that I see, when it comes to marketing, is that people who don’t notice that movies don’t go together because they pay no attention don’t seem like a promising place to look for people who want to pay $3000 for a two-day vacation filled with stuff related to these movies.

The timing of the hotel with the movies is also a bit odd. They want Kylo Ren, and they want him in his Darth Vader knockoff mask because that makes casting easier, so they are forced to set the hotel inbetween the first and second movie. Except they can’t do that, because there was only about a day between the first and second movie and they also want Rey and she was off on Achtung at the end of the first movie. And Kylo had destroyed his mask halfway through the second movie and was dead by the end of the third movie, and had only rebuilt it for a little while during the third movie. So really, there’s no plausible time to have set Galactic Starcruiser. Now, this fits in with people who pay no attention and don’t care about details, but again that seems an unlikely place to look for people who will want to pay $3000 for a two-day “immersive” experience. What’s the point of immersion if you’re not going to pay any attention to it? Why pay $3000 for something you don’t intend to remember?

It would have been different had the movies been good, or even if they were just coherent with each other. I’m not in the target market for this, so I can’t draw on my own intuitions, but I can at least imagine someone who loves a trilogy of movies spending a lot of money for a day or two of pretending that he’s in them. But other than that one who who did the trailer reaction where he was crying at the beauty of everything equally causing many people to question his manhood and most people to question his sanity, I can’t imagine someone loving these movies. They just don’t cohere enough for that to be possible.

And given the spectacular failure of Galactic Cruiser, I guess I’m not going out on much of a limb.