Starcruiser Resurrected: Could Disney’s $1 Billion Star Wars Experience Make an Unexpected Return? | Exclusive

If you were on one of the last “voyages” of the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, the $1 billion hotel and live experience housed in a stout grey building on Walt Disney World property outside of Orlando, Florida, chances are you had something waiting for you when you got home – an invitation to take a survey about your time on the ship.

Disney shuttered the ambitious “Star Wars” hotel at the end of September, closing its doors less than two years after it opened as a pricey ($4,800 for two people for two nights) live-in experience for fans of the sci-fi franchise. The brainchild of former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, its performance — marked by low attendance and the fact that it never turned a profit, TheWrap has learned — was an unmitigated disaster for the Walt Disney Company.

But an unusually specific survey obtained by TheWrap that was given to guests on the final voyages suggests to some that current CEO Bob Iger and other Disney executives may be rethinking their decision to shutter the Starcruiser completely. Questions in the survey, some say, point to a desire to rework and reopen the attraction as a more streamlined, less-costly experience.

“It’s better than 50/50,” Len Testa, President of Touring Plans and co-author of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, told TheWrap of the chances that the Starcruiser returns. “If they were going to lock the doors and walk away they wouldn’t be emailing every person who was on the Starcruiser to do a survey about how it might change.”

As one theme park insider quipped about a potential resurrection: “They might as well call the new spaceship the Phoenix.”

A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Disney officially announced The Galactic Starcruiser in 2017. It opened its doors in March 2022 as a two-day voyage in which guests would role play as their own in-universe “Star Wars” character, interacting with other guests and crew members as if they were on a cruise ship in space. Just before opening, Disney invited press (including myself) to tour the facilities and preview, for lack of a better term, the “gameplay” of the Galactic Starcruiser, which was genuinely flabbergasting.

A bungled marketing campaign and an exorbitant price point, however, kept people away. Demand remained low. The company canceled voyages on several dates. And in May of this year, Disney announced that the Galactic Starcruiser would be shutting its doors at the end of September.

Ultimately, only 71,000 guests experienced 274 “voyages” of the Galactic Starcruiser, not counting repeating guests (of which there were a surprising amount). The hotel had an average occupancy rate of 70%, meaning that some “cruises” had an occupancy as low as 20%. (Interestingly, total occupancy wasn’t based on the rooms but rather on how many people, somewhere around 370, could fit in the atrium of the hotel for the big show moments – like a tense face/off between Rey and Kylo Ren.)

Three individuals close to the project admitted that the experience never made money. That’s partly because there were two sets of characters on duty at all times — if one performer fell ill or broke a leg, there would be a understudy seamlessly taking center stage — and because Disney struggled to convey to the general public what, exactly, the Starcruiser was. Some cast members at Walt Disney World weren’t even sure.

But there were silver linings that were hard to ignore. The Galactic Starcruiser earned the highest guest satisfaction ratings of anything in Disney history.

It also cost a ton of money to develop and deploy, and failed to meet the company’s admittedly lofty expectations. Does this new survey really point to the Galactic Starcruiser’s return? And if it comes back, what form will it take?

Never Tell Me the Odds

If you got past the pre-screening questions, which eliminated those in certain professions (like bloggers or journalists) and, oddly, those who had completed graduate school, you were paid a fee between $150 and $250, asked to sign an NDA and given a private link to a live questionnaire.

The post-Starcruiser survey consisted of four sections (“Pre-Arrival,” “On Board,” “In Your Room” and “Overall”), with an additional questionnaire that guests were meant to fill out about the “Moments That Shaped My Halcyon Starcruiser Experience.” That questionnaire was broken down by day, with markers for the various activities (like “Return from Batuu” or “Dinner: Taste Around the Galaxy”). Some of the questions on the survey were incredibly granular, like “How long did it take you to prepare your character?” (You are encouraged – but not required – to come up with a detailed backstory before boarding the ship.) Some were far broader, like “What events impacted your personal story?” Others were even more telling, like asking, “Are you an introvert or an extrovert?”

Clearly, Disney was trying to get at something. When the Disney Institute, a similarly ambitious and ill-fated venture at Walt Disney World where guests signed up for classes in activities like archery or listened to a lecture from Martin Scorsese, unceremoniously closed, no surveys were sent out to guests about what aspect of the experience meant the most to them. Disney simply closed the books and moved on.

Disney did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on the surveys and the possibility of the Starcruiser returning.

Testa pointed to the questions about the in-room AI droid D3 and the “Datapad,” the app that drove much of the guest’s experience (accessible via your phone), which seem to emphasize cheaper technological touchpoints over costly person-to-person interaction. There are other issues Disney is trying to streamline, according to Testa, like the length of stay and the price.

“The perfect thing would be a one-day experience with an overnight stay in the hotel,” Testa said. “That would allow them to use the cabins and the restaurant and still give everybody all the play, all the restaurant benefits, you get to say you stayed in the hotel, but to do that at a price point that is half or less. If you can get it down to $2,000 a couple, that’s better than $5,000.”

An emphasis on the technological aspects of the experience could also sway those introverts that the survey was so keen on knowing more about, since it wouldn’t require direct interaction.

Disney would also have to improve its marketing, Testa stressed, especially if they were to re-launch the Starcruiser, since it was so disastrous the first time around. Every individual TheWrap spoke to cited marketing shortcomings as a key hurdle should they want to continue with the concept.

Others are more skeptical about the Starcruiser’s return.

“It’s a big leap of interpretation,” said one designer who works in the field. A more streamlined version of the experience would mean that it’s shorter, he said, pointing to the fact that fewer characters wouldn’t inherently affect the length of the experience, as several storylines are already occurring simultaneously, stacked on top of each other. Whether through removing or adding more characters, the work of shortening the story would require massive structural changes to the experience.

If they cut out an overnight stay at the hotel, the designer said, it would start to make the entire experience wobbly, since without use of the cabins or an overnight stay, you’d begin to wonder why the story is still themed around a cruise at all.

Instead of gathering information on how to bring the Starcruiser back, he thinks Disney is just trying to make a clean break. “They’re trying to exit this thing with as much data possible,” the designer said.

When Disney announced that the Starcruiser was going down, it sent ripples throughout the themed entertainment industry that will undoubtedly be felt for years to come. According to one individual with knowledge of the project, a “Game of Thrones” experience meant to build on what the Starcruiser had done was ultimately canceled by Warner Bros.

“I just don’t see it happening,” this industry insider said of a Starcruiser resurrection.

There Is Another

Brooke Geiger McDonald is a journalist in Chicago and a Galactic Starcruiser super-fan. She has a cool tattoo of the Chandrila logo and was on one of the last voyages on Sept. 26 — her fifth time. And while she isn’t sure that the Galactic Starcruiser will be back, she is sure that the legacy of the Halcyon will live on.

“It might be the end of the experience but it can’t possibly be the end of this thing that has been created, in a spiritual sense, in what Starcruiser and the community came to stand for,” McDonald said.

She pointed to a moment on her last voyage, when she was walking back from Batuu to get on the special transport that shuttles you back to the Starcruiser. She looked around, taking in the beauty of a corridor that so few people have seen. And she started to weep. “It was such a loss,” McDonald said. One of the passenger services crew (referred to as “blue crew” in Starcruiser lingo) grabbed her hand and said, “We’re going to get on this, together as one.” (“Together as one,” taken from a moment on the Starcruiser, has been embraced as the unofficial motto for the experience.)

“The community can’t go away,” McDonald said. “We’re not going to let it.” Shortly after the final voyage, a fan group, Heroes of the Halcyon, organized a meet-up at Planet Hollywood in Disney Springs, the shopping and dining district of Walt Disney World. Performers from the Galactic Starcruiser mingled with guests who had been on the “cruises.” Next year there is talk of doing Haly-Con, a convention dedicated to all things Galactic Starcruiser. That tattoo that McDonald has? Twenty other members of the tight-knit crew have also gotten one.

McDonald said there could be a “limited time” version of the Starcruiser, pointing to how elaborate Halloween Horror Nights, the annual scary-season favorite from Universal Studios, has become. But the experience, she said, shouldn’t be fundamentally altered. McDonald and so many others have had unforgettable experiences on board the Halcyon. One of her sons had his entire birthday party — dedicated to one of the First Order characters — on board the Starcruiser. And five voyages in, she said, she has barely scratched the surface.

She’s not too keen on what the obvious alterations would be, either. “The number one thing I hate to hear is to scale back the interactivity, scale back the performers and make it more of a hotel,” McDonald said. “That is completely representative of the entire problem and what got us here – that’s not what this is and it’s not going to fix anything. That’s going to be a hotel that is too expensive rather than an experience that is so fulfilling.”

McDonald said that Disney could introduce new storylines to the Starcruiser experience but again might not need to; there were supposedly 17,000 possible storylines (before factoring in improvisational elements from cast members and guests). Much of the fun of the Starcruiser experience was the interaction between the guests and these new characters, something that she hopes Starcruiser 2.0 maintains.

“Everyone feels so attached to these new characters,” McDonald said. “People would be really disappointed to return and not have them. These new characters are so beloved and they’re the ones you get so much time with. I hope they find a way to keep them around.”

Even if the Starcruiser never makes it back into hyperspace, the memories that McDonald and the rest of her fellow space travelers made will never go away.

Hopefully they all, very emphatically, filled out their surveys.

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