Schadenfreude Watch and TL;DR discussion: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel (2024)

Watched:  08/19/2024

Format:  YouTube

Viewing:  First/ Second

Director:  Jenny Nicholson

This will be a TL;DR post.  Heads up.  If Nicholson can drop a 4-hour video, I can drop a jumbo-sized post.

I've provided headings if you want to scroll through to get to certain sections.

Nicholson is an Online Person

I'm counting Jenny Nicholson's in/famous Disney's Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser  four hour YouTube opus as a documentary.  Because that's what The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel (2024) is - a document of a particular thing, told with a specific point of view. 

I was introduced to Nicholson via the Dug a few years ago, and, during COVID, I wound up watching several of her older videos, after watching her near four hour discussion of the Utah-based "immersive" experience, "Evermore".  I highly recommend that video as well - and it gives a lot of street cred to Nicholson as a non-crank when it comes to role-play experiences.

For years, Nicholson was a pop-culture YouTuber - somehow not adopting the weird quirks of YouTube stardom - likely because she came pre-loaded with her own bag of quirks.  She discussed Star Wars movies, Harry Potter, whatever was in cinemas, and was very into theme parks and nerdy experiences.

I think I would describe Nicholson as the quiet, kinda nerdy girl you saw in the hallway in high school and you assumed you had nothing in common, and then you sat next to her in Government, found out she's actually hilarious, and then you're buds, even if you don't hang out much outside of school.

Nicholson is a small woman, and she's unassuming.  She wears costumes during parts of her videos, knowing that just seeing her staring at the camera is probably a lot.  And she surrounds herself with plushies - some of which are mind-boggling, like what I think is a 4 foot high Porg.

At some point I thought she'd hung up the ring camera and went to be an office drone or something, but she'd gone over to Patreon, where, if my math is correct, she is making a bucket ton of money producing content.  At 50K+ patrons, at $2+ a month...  ay carumba.  I'm in the wrong business.

It is likely you missed the "Evermore" discussion, but I want to point out - for all the hubbub about Nicholson's Star Wars Hotel video nearing 10 million clicks on YouTube, that video about the fantasy-land gone wrong in Utah (that you never heard of) has earned 11 million views to date.  Not "Beyonce dropped a new single and it's hour number two" numbers, but highly respectable if my own double-digit views are any indication.

Like a Sarah Silverman without the swears and potty talk, Nicholson seems like a sweet, disarming woman who likes fun things, and then flips the script. You may think she's going to just kind of get her opinion out there, and you can take it or leave it, and that's fine - and then she pulls out the knives and eviscerates an entire corporate structure, pulling off the mask like the end Scooby-Doo.  

At the end of the day, she's a fan, but not an uncritical one.  She's savvy and smart, and unlike 95% of fandom content creators, she can't help but notice bullshit, even as she's asking to be lied to by people in Imperial Officer uniforms.  

Pre-Nicholson and the Star Wars Hotel

I recall first hearing about the "Galactic Starcruiser" well before it was set to open.  And my first thought was "that sounds awful".  

That's mostly because I'm a bad person, who hates joy.  But...

Look, Michael Crichton wasn't right about everything, but when he cooked up his concept of Westworld, he did more thinking about what it would take to be fully "immersive environment" - the thing theme parks keep promising to deliver - than what any corporation has pulled off as they eventually cow before the accountants and faithless MBA's. 

Early on, the sketches of the possible Star Wars Hotel experience that hit the media contained families dressed in the karate outfits and robes that people in the background wear in Star Wars.  They clinked glasses with Cantina aliens in shadowy bars and mixed it up onboard a ship in something that looked reasonably Star Wars adjacent.  

The idea was: for a couple of days, you and your family would become Star Wars characters.  You'd role-play live with Star Wars characters, going on what seemed to be an improvisational adventure of your own making.  

But the economics of this never made sense.  You can't have Chewbacca giving everyone the same level of attention.  There will not be a Bossk waiting to hang out with you at the bar.  You aren't having bothersome conversations with an annoying Droid.  You are not getting to meet Jennifer Beals in her Twi'Lek outfit (was that out loud?  Leave me alone.).

To me, it seemed the cost of running something that was going to be fully immersive, as this promised to be, would be *astronomical*.  Further, it would require *everyone* to be in character, with employees of Disney shepherding the experience.  If they went cheap and if they didn't get people into costumes at least, it was going to be what - from pics I saw - it ultimately was:  Families kind of wandering around a "spaceship" in their street-clothes looking kind of tired in vaguely sci-fi environs.  

I've been to Disneyland and I've been to RenFests, and the best time to be at either is before the crowds of people wearing cargo shorts and t-shirts arrive and you aren't dodging strollers.  It's when there's a ratio of visitors to employees even enough that a visitor can stumble upon clusters of characters in costume and with the energy to stay in character.  What is not immersive is the sandwich line at 3:00 PM when kids are screaming, mom is shouting at dad, and dad has gone to his mental space where he's silently tallying the cost of this whole trip and realizing: the only memories of this thing that just put them in debt for years will be bad memories.  

I've seen that look.  It's unnerving.

Until you Westworld the experience - making people put on costumes, making them role-play - it's going to be just a sort of cheesy experience of bright-eyed Floridians calling the green Jell-O on your lunch tray Dagobah Delight.  It's finding oneself, as an adult, looking out over crowds of heads and iPhones whilst someone dressed as Rey does her best Daisy Ridley for 15 minutes, absolutely not talking to you, and avoiding situations where she has to go off script.

I could not imagine how it was going to work that Disney was going to keep up the illusion of fun and fantasy in, essentially, what they were selling as an open environment.  It could only work keeping guests on narrow paths which accommodated a specific storyline where free will does not exist.  

You may have wanted to role-play as a spacefaring arms dealer, but *no one cares*.  You are there witnessing bits of a script play out in easy, pluggable moments anyone can do.  Because a 9 year old needs to participate, too.  (spoiler: Disney went for the narrow narrative lanes approach.)

And then I saw the price tag.  

Look, I don't go to Comic-Cons because I can't justify spending gas, hotel, and entry fees of hundreds of dollars before I even buy a photo "opportunity" with Dr. Crusher that lasts about 40 seconds.  I cannot fathom spending $6000 of salary on a 2-day experience in which I'm just being kind of shoved around by an app on my phone.  Nor do I want to imagine the scant moments in which characters try to improv against my awkwardness and cognitive dissonance and it winds up just terrible for both of us.  

And, if you're wondering, a base package for two people, for two days, was about $6000.  That's before airfare, additional hotels, etc...  

Friends, that much will buy you a pretty good time in most cities where you aren't pretending to go on adventures - you're actually out doing things.  Per free will: in Vegas, you can get into insane amounts of trouble on $6000.  And for more than 2 days.  But never stay in Vegas for more than 3 days.  Pro tip.

And, btw, $6000 was essentially the starting price.  That's your bottom-line room with no frills, checking in on a Friday afternoon and kicked out by 9:30 AM on Sunday.

But, I absolutely could believe the cost when I first heard about it - because things cost money and Disney still has to fluff their shareholders after they've paid everyone.  

Sigh.  Then I saw Disney's now infamous promo video starring the weird kid from The Goldbergs.  

Look, I have a pretty good idea what Star Wars looks like after 9 movies, and it doesn't look like a high school with some vaguely Art Deco-ish flair glued onto the surfaces.   I was stunned by how.... cheap it looked, like someone threw up some sheetrock and another team came along and tacked on some detail.  

Then they showed what was supposed to be the "wow" factor - the activities onboard - and they were the sort of thing, that if you saw it at EPCOT, you'd play for a minute and then step back and let the small children play it - because it is decidedly not for adults, and isn't much fun if you understand cause and effect.

Disney pulled that promo video after just a few days, but the word was out.  Of course, rather than take that as feedback, throw on the brakes and do some play testing and polling, they just went ahead and opened the reservations.  And the nerds hurled their Mastercards at Disney so fast they lodged like shuriken.

And then nothing.  I think I saw "oh yeah, they opened that Star Wars thing" here and there, but no real feedback.

Sometime in COVID-times, I went looking for footage, curious to see anything of the place in action - assuming Disney would take away phones.  But, instead, I stumbled upon Ordinary Adventures, a YouTube channel about a pair of ding-dongs who have convinced the internet to fund a lifestyle where all they do is the stuff you'd do maybe once or twice in a lifetime, and that's their job.  And among those things was a lengthy series of their time on the Galactic Starcruiser, which they participated in very early on (and kept going back to).

Over a week or so, I saw all of the videos, and my impression was "there are some aspects of this that aren't that bad.  But I'm not sure this is a better way to spend money than just going to the park and harassing the characters there.  Also, Hawai'i is super nice."

I never totally wrote off going, I should add.  The minute you trash talk something like that is, in my experience, the same minute you just closed the door on that very thing happening you were probably up for.  (But I also was never going to pay for it myself.)

As if hundreds of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

In September of 2023, The Galactic Starcruiser/ Star Wars Hotel closed its doors.  

It's worth noting that in November 2022, Disney's much-reviled CEO Bob Chapek was also given the boot from Disney.

I barely follow this stuff, and *I* know Chapek was a notoriously cheap and unimaginative business guy who probably did more damage to the Disney brand and reputation in a few short years than anyone figured was possible - and they're still dealing with the ramifications.  

Five minutes into his tenure, Chapek made a lot of nerds squirm by repeatedly referring to the shows and movies produced by Disney - Marvel, Star Wars, etc... - as "content", as if it were widgets being produced that we all needed at home, not shows we hope are being told because they *had* to be told.

He was a bit notorious as the Parks Guy for de-theming hotels and whatnot while retaining or jacking up prices.  You could see his line of thinking in everything happening as soon as he came in.  The Star Wars Hotel was also conceived and launched entirely as his baby, starting when he was head of Hotels and Parks for Disney and opening during his tenure as CEO.

Now, Disney was in a horrible spot during COVID.  For almost a year, they had to close the parks.  For a very long time, no one came out to the movies.  

In the midst of all this, they opened the Star Wars Hotel.  And I suspect Chapek's thrifty fingers are all over why, when I looked at the hours of Ordinary Adventures footage, I couldn't help but notice "hey, there's like, no droids or aliens in your Star Wars experience.  An experience based on a film series famously full of droids and aliens."  

We need droids, we need aliens, we need ships, we need Jedis, I guess.  But instead we had tourists in Spirit Halloween costumes and cargo shorts and 20 year-olds in badly cut uniforms who all seem like they're happy to be there, but know this is dumb and maybe a bit cringey.

Then, well before closing, word was leaking out that they were letting actors go, and the hotel was having fewer "sailings" or whatever.  And I remember thinking "yeah, my dude, the economy is not great and you're charging a family of four a huge portion of their yearly salaries for a two day goof."

And, it turns out, rich people know they can go to Europe or the Maldives and not spend their time rubbing elbows with nerds.

But I didn't think about it all that much.  The math was simple - the Star Wars Hotel was too expensive to run, they couldn't reduce the cost, they overestimated demand at that price and they ran out of money.  Same as every business that ever shut its doors.

There was and is a Galactic Starcruiser Reddit, and it now feels like kids standing around kicking dirt in the lot where their old hangout used to be, talking about old times and "wouldn't it be cool if..." scenarios.  I'd estimate these people are, charitably, in the hundreds of souls.  

But I don't know if, outside of that kind of fan, anyone cared that it closed.  It's like when you see some article about some place in LA closing and the writers assume everyone cares.  Here in flyover space, we truly, truly do not.

And then, this summer, Jenny Nicholson showed up on YouTube for the first time in about a year.

The Star Wars Hotel Video

What's remarkable about the Star Wars Hotel video* is that it's 100% going to be the defining documentary of the foundations, marketing, existence, experience, and failure of Disney's Titanic (yes, it gets a mention - sort of).  That's all great. 

But.  

The doc is really a court-case building to an indictment of Disney as exemplar of the modern consumer experience and how Walt's company is doing everything they can to provide the least amount possible after promising the moon and stars to people who love one of their product lines so much they want to live in it for a weekend.

Nicholson has her series of Star Wars costumes ready to go - most hand-made.  And clearly this was shot over time as the stuffed animals in her background tends to move around a bit over the video's four hours.  

Aside from her staring into camera, she also cuts in clips, photos, her own video, etc...

I started watching this epic just 30 or 40 minutes after it dropped.  As I said - I watched it over two days and tried to get other folks to watch it or at least listen to it like a podcast.  (Only Laura listened, because Laura is my only friend.)  So this is my second viewing, but I never talked about it after my first.  

And then, Jamie was starting to watch the video the other day after NPR did a blurb on it (apparently my prodding is nothing compared to the smooth voices of public radio).  And when she reached over to turn it off, I said "nah, I'll watch it again."  Because I was fine with a refresher.  The video is long, it is information packed, it's funny, it's enraging, exasperating and - ultimately - kind of sad.  Thanks to Nicholson, it is a *good story* and a *very well told story*.  And it actually means something.

It may be a non-traditional documentary, but it is a documentary insofar as it's incredibly deeply-researched, the filmmaker presents a story, and, from it, draws conclusions both specific and universal.  She brings receipts to make her points.  She's both inside and outside of the happenings, so it's not about her - but it is about what is happening in the land Walt built - and it is about how she saw it.

In the video, Nicholson tracks the roll out of the hotel - what was in the media, how she signed up, etc...  I think, importantly - she highlights Disney's reliance on "influencers" to sell the hotel.   Once the company learned they didn't know how to otherwise sell the idea, and that all anyone could talk about was the price, they seem to have loaded influencers with talking points, asking out loud: "is it worth the money?" 

And this is one of one or two questions that run as a thread through every question raised and every part of the experience.  Because the influencers answer a certain way, and it is absolutely beyond not helpful - it's a lie.

She runs through the cost comparisons between this and other experiences like a Disney Cruise, etc...  And what you're doing to your consumers who are planning to spend gobs of money for a once-in-a-lifetime family experience.  And it's kind of horrifying.

Unlike many Vloggers, what Nicholson is not is someone whose living is derived from a good-to-neutral relationship with Disney.  She's a fan, but she is going to be just fine making videos about pop culture for years to come, not worrying about getting bounced from the double-secret VIP list for Mickey's Not-Very-Scary Halloween Party  

So, she experienced the hotel like you or me - it was not a curated experience in any way.  Most of us are not going to spend $6000 with the mind of filming our theme park hotel for a review, but as a fan and person with a hobby of live action role-play, she was the ideal reviewer.

Then, while she had gone and was back in editing, Disney announced the closing of the Star Wars Hotel.  Her video went from a review (god knows how that would have gone for Disney) to a post-mortem.

Despite all the pre-amble, what I don't want to do is spoil the video.  I don't want to go over her experience in detail or do a review of her review.  I want you to go in, fairly fresh, and see her unpack this thing.  

I don't watch long or boring videos, and this one is merely long, minutes-wise - but also broken up into, like, 20 specific chapters, each making a point and argument, that culminates in what I'd call a sort of "prestige", where she discusses what all of this actually means.  And it's... almost unsettling.

So, watch to the end.

What I will say is that Nicholson had an unforgivably janky experience that *never* should happen to a guest at Disney - especially at that cost.  And - it had nothing to do with the cast or other guests ruining her day.  It was entirely the fault of a failed UX, software and systems, all of which should have had easy fail-safes for both Disney and the user considered by Disney's supposedly famous care and control, with both fully functional systems and the contingencies built and functional before launch.  

As an IT manager, frankly, I was aghast.  But I am infrequently working against Bob Chapek's need for a win in Q3 of year 202X.

Further, like a fool, Nicholson believed in the sales pitch of what this experience might be - because Disney said so.  Over and over.  She listened when Disney said "you can have your own Star Wars adventure", so she made up a character and a costume and went.  And that was, apparently, not great.

Maybe the great symbol of how it went was that - in the one place Nicholson was *guaranteed* to have a Star Wars moment - she couldn't see.  If sightlines are the number one thing you think about for an audience experience in live entertainment, they never thought once about people in the back.  Disney being okay with a column blocking the view of a few customers because they already have your money is, maybe, the perfect analogy.

The Dénouement (maybe spoilers?)

Sure, it's fun and thrilling and frustrating to see Nicholson deliver the various facts about the Star Wars Hotel and be able to illustrate it's weaknesses.  

I haven't been there, I wasn't going, but after hours of Vloggers squealing with delight at things that seemed decidedly "meh", it was at least a sanity check for me on my sofa.

In the last sections, like a detective, Nicholson has lured us all in, and like Poirot, she lays out her case for why this is all so... fucked.  And why The Star Wars Hotel was not just a sign of, but the embodiment of, the current thinking.  And it's arguably the betrayal of the brand and persona Disney has spent literally 100 years building.  

The premise is simple:  Disney has pivoted from just delivering a quality experience to chasing every penny they can squeeze out of their customers, while providing less in return.  In fact, they've now erected paywalls within the parks so they can force that desperate mom and dad from the lunchline into paying not just for plush Dumbos, but a bit more for getting in line to see Dumbo or ride the Dumbo ride without waiting for 3 hours to do so in your very limited time within the park on the expensive day you already paid for.  The new ride at Disney is the Sunk-Cost Fallacy. 

The evidence is... utterly damning.  And it makes well-paid executives look like assholes and the Imagineers useful stooges.  And they deserve it.  And when you own ABC, you can say whatever you want to a reporter's face, and they'll put it on air - you can push whatever you want on a public with chronic FOMO.  

Nicholson lays out her case and says almost nothing without also *showing* the executives, Disney artwork and promo materials, and other evidence backing it up directly.  If she were an attorney wrapping up her case, this is when she pulls all the evidence into a convincing picture for us, the jury.  And she sticks the landing like a gold medalist.

If you watched the first 3/4ths of the video thinking "they should really hire Nicholson and pay her a hefty consulting fee", you realize two things before it's over.

1)  She has completely exposed and embarrassed Disney's executives, and if the hotel were still open, she could have easily tanked Disney stock or taken the whole thing down.

2)  She does not give a fuuuuuuck, and I doubt she wants to help them.  She's said her piece.  They can figure it out from here.

It's breathtaking.  

And, a little sad.

I think we all wanted to think that if anyone was going to figure out how to let you spend a weekend in Star Wars, it was Disney.  I was skeptical, but I like being proven wrong.  I like Disney - I'm wearing a  Donald Duck shirt as I type this.  

I think, ultimately, Nicholson wants for them to just do better by their guests.  She doesn't swear off Disney or Star Wars.  But she's not so blinded by the light of a lightsaber, she doesn't see the buyer putting his finger on the scale.  She sees the shiny rock for fool's gold and remembers when they swore we'd get real gold.  She sees the house always wins, but they don't need to also rob your home while you're away.

Disney has *always* monetized the desire of people to want to give their kids good memories and great experiences.  But now that they're trapped - why not mug them?

And, here, Disney seems to have been counting on the kinds of people who show up for Star Wars Celebration to decide they *also* needed to drop a month or three's pay on a single weekend experience.  An experience that was mostly inane activities in a hotel that looks neither comfortable nor relaxing, or, in my opinion, fun. 

But if there's one thing fans do, we dig in our heels and defend any old dumb thing because it's got the right logo on it.  That Nicholson wasn't that person takes the story from a sad little story about a neat idea that was too good for this world and says "no, this was unethical, and had it succeeded, who knows what would have happened.  And here's the evidence and why."  

And that's... maybe good for all of us to think on in this world of brand loyalties and tribal fandoms.

Walt and Plussing

What she doesn't get into is that Walt, a mid-20th Century conservative from humble origins, would be firing everyone involved with the business decisions around the hotel.  He would love the *idea* of the hotel, hate the execution, and hate that executives were doing this with such a lack of care for the consumer.  

Walt called visitors to the parks his "Guests".  And he *meant* it.  After all, he's the guy who used to walk Main Street at Disneyland and talk to guests to make sure things were swell, and try them most everything out himself.  Many of the changes during his lifetime were things he suggested from personal experience.  He had an apartment in the park so he could be close by.  

You think Chapek spent more than thirty minutes in that hotel?

What Walt knew was that the illusion was how you made people think they were in Fantasyland.  It wasn't in how you dealt with others, shaking them down to give you money.  Giving them more than what they bargained for or imagined - this is inherently what we think of when think of Disney, and why we pay a premium on Disney experiences without grumbling.  

Walt had a tremendous ability to hear an idea out, and then say "and how can we make it even better?"  This was what he called "plussing" (ie: how we got Disney+).  You don't just have a cart that people ride in through a haunted house, now it's a "Doom Buggy".  And what if, the last thing people saw when they left that house was a ghost hitching a ride?  That's a plus.  

Everything Nicholson shows in her video is a "minus".  You're sent to go on "missions" in Star Wars Land in the park, but all you're doing is QR code scanning?  On a crowded street?  And nothing happens when you finish?  Walt would be so disappointed.  This is where you could have droids and aliens.  You could have sounds and lights.  Instead, you have terrible games on *your own phone*.

That's busy work, pals.  That's a meaningless task to keep dumb people busy, and it is *not* an immersive experience,  And immersive experience is letting a guest, say, have drinks with Jennifer Beals.  

Just spit-balling here.  Just throwing out ideas.

It's true that Walt was also, because of his Moonshot-type-ideas, almost always bankrupting The Walt Disney Company.  That's a separate story.  And while I am sure Walt cared about the shareholders (they went public in 1957), he knew the best value for all concerned was to treat the customer right and add some magic.  

But Bob Chapek knows one does not maximize shareholder profits for Q4 by seeing if you can make a real lightsaber happen.  You grab a plastic one from the bin at the gift store and hope the dummies don't notice.

And in conclusion...

I'm good with Nicholson resurfacing to YouTube maybe once a year with one of these deep-dives to remind non-Patrons she exists.  I don't think you get a documentary like this without some serious time and thought.

If this post is overly long and you still don't know what's in the video - go take a look.  It's free to watch.  

As I said, I was never going to pay to go to the Star Wars Hotel, anyway.  My skin in this game was always minimal.  I don't think I've really cared much about Star Wars at all since Season 2 of The Mandalorian.  Surely Rise of Skywalker felt like someone telling me I could be done now and not care anymore.  I'm in my Star Trek: Strange New Worlds era.

But mostly I find the doc fascinating as an autopsy on a failed hubristic experiment that let itself be strangled to death by accountants and terrified executives.  I have opinions about what they could and should have done, but realistically, no corporation would ever *do* those things.  I also likely wouldn't do those things, either, because I'm familiar with LARPing and have managed to avoid doing it for three decades.  Look, if you're just now figuring out I'm not an agreeable person, I can't help you.

I find it fascinating that someone who wants to project the image of a sweetheart just laid bare the kind of dumb-foolery that seems to infiltrate that odd space where commerce, art and fun meet.  I don't think Nicholson's video resonates because it's confirmation bias for me, so much as I appreciate a good argument and it really did (and this is always dangerous with YouTube) make me think a bit beyond my general natural skepticism and misanthropy to consider the forces at work.

Anyway, may the force be with Nicholson and she live long and prosper.

Also, yes, Jennifer Beals as a Twi'Lek probably did me some permanent damage

*Yes, officially, the Star Wars Hotel is named Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, but Nicholson starts her video by saying the obvious: most people just call it "the Star Wars hotel".  The Star Wars hotel is what you can say when you want your Aunt Pearl to maybe remember seeing a bit on that place on The Today Show.