Not to surprised to hear it's shutting down. I really think Disney over estimated how many people were willing to spend the kind of money they were charging for something like this.
I can't imagine that would have made a difference. Florida's Disney World is considered much more of a "vacation destination", where Disneyland in CA is the "local's park" and gets the majority of its business from California residents. Would CA people love to pop down for a week-end spent on a Starcruiser? Sure, but how many? Impossible to say. If Disney did one thing wrong, it was miscalculating how many people would be interested in this experience. Oh, well. However, the company deserves enormous credit for taking a big swing with this project, which was utterly unprecedented and which was actually a top notch experience, despite being plagued by PR issues and bad press from the jump. Maybe it was never going to work financially, but I'd much rather see a company "fail" by trying something bold and new and different than just give us the same old crap over and over.
It's a good point. I think it still would have been expensive. Probably even more given the cost of land here vs swampland Florida. It's one of the reasons Disney went to that area in Florida to begin with. Cheap swampland. The flipside is that maybe it would get more visitors from the upper crust young tech bros or something like that but I don't know what the cross section of rich young people with disposable income and SW fans is. I live in California and I'll say that the thought of flying over to Florida for just 2 nights sounds ridiculous. I'm sure people did it but that's a long flight for that. Of course you make it a longer vacation including something else but now you're really getting up there in the costs. Bottom line, regardless of location, Disney overestimated this project. I still think it was a fantastic idea.
They definitely did. And their poor marketing did them no favors. But it was a fantastic idea and the execution was terrific. A shame.
https://wdwnt.com/2023/05/ceo-bob-iger-rejected-retheme-ideas-for-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser/ No. No they did not.
I think the Imagineers and creators and actors and cast members behind this experience came across very well, as they delivered a top notch experience. As for Disney execs.....nope!
Guarantee a fair number of those last bookings are from people determined to clear out as much of the exclusive merch in the giftshop as possible in order to flip it on ebay for a high mark-up (after maybe sitting on it for a year to maximise scarcity.) Whether that'll actually end up being profitable after factoring in the ticket price is another matter, but I've learned never to underestimate the greed of chancer scalpers.
Damnit, why didn't I think of that??? (Jokes aside, for a $5k price tag, you'd have to move a LOT of merch. Seems unlikely.)
As someone who lives here in the Pacific Northwest, growing up in the 70s and 80s, pretty much everyone went to Disneyland or Hawaii because they were easily accessible and relatively inexpensive to travel to. If someone you knew in school traveled to Florida to go to Disneyworld, that meant their parents were well off and could afford to travel and stay in a luxury resort. To this day, most people I know keep their travels limited to the West Coast, vacationing in Arizona or Mexico, rarely traveling farther East than the Midwest/Chicago. So, yes, a Galactic Starcruiser experience in California would probably have garnered a lot more visitors.
I agree. I still think it has more to do with real estate in Florida being cheaper than California. Disneyland is quite landlocked into Anaheim with no room to grow. DL got into a bit of social 'trouble' for wanting to buy a low income housing area(?) adjacent to build on. I can't remember if they did manage that. It would have to be somewhere else not LA area. However to the previous poster's point, This West Coast tends to be more affluent than the East Coast. Florida itself is still 'the South' whereas the PNW seems to be more affluent recently because of tech. So yes, I can see people from Seattle flying down for the weekend to go to DL. I can't see people from WV flying down to Orlando for DW. I don't mean to poke fun at WV. I lived there for a decade. I know it's a poor state and then you think of the other areas that are economically poorer that surround(southern Ohio, most of Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, etc...). Would Disney go elsewhere? Maybe central California location would have made sense. It's an interesting 'What if' for sure.
So am I the only one that thinks "they just underestimated how many people were willing to pay to stay at this place" kind of a nonsense excuse? I mean . . . it's a hotel. Getting people to pay to stay there is literally it's entire business model. Ever heard of market research? Focus groups? Marketing consultants? Financial risk assessment? What I'm getting at here is that there's no way in hell that this is down to a miscalculation. This is Disney. A behemoth corporate entity. They probably spend more on annual accountancy fees than the GDP of some smaller countries. This is greed. Nothing more, nothing less. Someone knew full well this probably wouldn't fly, that the market likely wouldn't support it, and someone greenlit the thing anyway. Because they gotta show something new to the investors, they gotta hit up those quarterly reports, and they gotta make sure that when it inevitably crashes & burns that someone else gets blamed. Literally everyone else saw this coming a parsec away, so of course they did to. To claim otherwise is to be just adorably naive.
And the lesson is: never overestimate an executive's competence. Also, didn't he replace the original person in charge of the Star Wars end of the parks? I vaguely recall a lady who's name escapes me being given the push early on when the Galaxy's Edge attendance wasn't where they wanted it to be. (Sound familiar?) This is where the "make it happen" corporate attitude gets people. If you have unrealistic expectations at the top, and fire anyone that can't achieve them, you're only going to get yesmen and grifters in middle management who's only real skill is in deflecting blame, then failing upwards when it inevitably comes crashing down.