I've been twice.
It was the most ambitious and formally unprecedented project in the history of the company. It was a miracle it existed at all, regardless of how long. Getting a new idea into a company this big, and this risk averse, is a herculean effort. For me, it elevated Star Wars to the level of ritually participatory myth, and the most painful part about seeing it close has been the reaction from folks who really have no idea what the the thing is. Disney never called it a hotel. Because it isn't a hotel, any more than a car is an expensive chair. Sure, it has a seat, but that's not why the thing exists. Starcruiser has a bed to enable the experience. That's it. Folks poking fun at the building don't realize that the building and the room are just alibis for interaction. A stage for the actual experience, which is a person-to-person, intimate narrative experience which has yielded the highest guest satisfaction ratings Disney has ever seen.
Reclaiming a lost sense of play, especially for adults, is the unique magic of the immersive medium. It's a primal human experience to engage in that kind of ritual participation. The Imagineers who designed Starcruiser know that. They brought in some of the best minds in the immersive theatre world to help craft the project, and imbue it with systems that foster community, empathy, and shared storytelling. Over the years, I've spoken to so many players who feel that they have gotten in touch with their truest self by participating in embodied experiences like this. Star Wars fans like to talk about Joseph Campbell in terms of mythic structure, but Starcruiser marked our first chance to ritually enact that myth in such a profound and traditionally Campbellian manner. That's pure magic.
From my vantage point (admittedly biased by my proximity to the immersive industry from which it was born) its failure was one of marketing, and that's an unenviable position for anyone to be tasked with selling somethings that's never existed. (Even Disneyland could point to comparable offerings before it was built.) As the dust settles, it's clear the YouTube grifters and clickbait farms won the war, which they waged before anyone knew what this thing was. If there was a marketing campaign that could have corrected for the false information spread about this thing, it wasn't the one they went with.
And my heart goes out to the teams that were trying to find a more sustainable cadence for this, but will never get the chance to find the equilibrium of demand and labor costs, as they were trying to before corporate maneuvering pulled the plug. (They had announced lowering the number of voyages to two per week for later in the year, in an attempt to condense the existing demand, but the newly announced closure date is before any such adjustments could be attempted.)
More has been said about cost than I'd ever care to say, but honestly, knowing what it was, I expected it to cost more. Putting a price on a full cast of broadway-caliber actors for two days, giving you a once-in-a-lifetime experience you will remember long past the time you'd have forgotten any vacation -- it's a different kind of calculation. It also doesn't help that many online outlets flat-out lied about the price. Grab four of your fellow fans, and you can have a real adventure in your favorite fictional world for around $1,400. Aspirationally priced, but as they would say about a film, "it's all on the screen," and I haven't met anyone among the thousands of voyagers I've talked to over the last fourteen months who says it was not worth it for them. To have a character tap them on the shoulder and say "I need your help," and be swept up in a totally original story that's canon to a universe they love.
I'm sad it is closing, and I'm worried what it will mean for my industry, but I'm so glad it existed.
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