Disney is having to dial back its Star Wars hotel because people are embarrassed to go to it

Wouldn't you be?

Roughly a year after its debut, Disney is slashing bookings at its Star Wars-themed Disney World hotel. Nobody wants to go to this thing.

In case you weren’t aware, the “Galactic Starcruiser” is a two-day “immersive” facility in which guests drop $5,000 to stay in a comprehensive Star Wars environment, complete with staffers playing out a scripted storyline, one in which the guests are meant to take part. I don’t know what the story is—the spaceship gets hijacked by the Empire, I think. Or maybe it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. I think Chewbacca makes an appearance, along with some characters from the worthless sequel movies. If you’re staying in this hotel you’re supposed to play along with the whole thing, running throughout the ship, interacting with the actors, doing Star Wars stuff, occasionally breaking away for themed meals in the cafeteria and themed drinks in the bar. It all looks like a completely Disneyfied version of Star Wars—clean, sanitized, oversaturated, gleaming, safe, corporate. It’s hard to imagine this is even nominally the same franchise that brought us Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt and that brutal searing lightsaber sequence on Bespin. Everything is so saccharine now, so pretty, as if it’s all been freshly Windex’d and smeared with Purell.

I think this hotel’s slow-motion and ongoing failure says two things, one about Disney and one about reality. To the first: Disney has obviously overplayed its hand here. They sunk what is reported to be a billion bucks into this gaudy, ridiculous little feature, and now it looks like they’re going to struggle to recoup it, if they ever will. A billion dollars is a ton of money, even for a gargantuan company like Disney. They bet big that people would want to come and lope around a fake starship for two days and clumsily pretend to be Star Wars extras with park staffers. They bet big and it looks like they lost.

It’s instructive to see this kind of unforced error on the part of a mega-corp like Disney, which on a good day simply can’t help but make money without even trying. Nobody is above this sort of blunder. Remember that the next time you think you’ve got a sure thing. It’s always good to pause and ask yourself, “What am I doing here?”

To the second: What is obviously happening is that people are just completely embarrassed at the mega-escapist quality of this hotel, the sort of childish abandon that it so fulsomely represents. Galactic Starcruiser is where the winsome limits of fantasy encounter the stubborn border of consciousness and shame. We would all surely love to fly on a spaceship, play with a lightsaber, do Star Wars stuff. The movies make it all look like great fun. But you can never do any of that stuff, because it’s not real. It’s just movie sets and props and rotoscoping and CGI. None of it ever actually happened and it’s still not happening at Disney World. It’s just fictional entertainment.

Of course any reasonable person will readily admit as much. But Disney’s gamble was that it ultimately didn’t matter—that enough people would be willing to suspend that admission for a couple of days and $5,000 that they could make this thing pay. But even the mass legions of uncomfortably devoted Star Wars fans have their limits, and their dignity. And quite frankly this kind of extended playacting—this weird, moneyed version of a child’s playtime game—is completely undignified. Retreating into an elaborately constructed daydream like this is a perfect study in embarrassment. If you saw a grown man doing this in his backyard you’d find him pitiable and pathetic at best. That doesn’t change if he’s doing it at Disney World. It’s still the same thing, just dressed up in several layers of corporate indulgence.

Of course, this kind of uncomfortable escapism can and does manifest itself in other ways. People don’t want to do a two-day Star Wars hotel, but they’ll still shell out thousands of dollars to wander around the rest of the fake and contrived theme park, overloading on a mixture of nostalgia and oversaturated sensory stimulation. People will watch hours upon hours of Disney streaming shows rather than read a book or go for a walk or learn a new language. More and more people are foregoing having any children at all in favor of a perpetual adolescence in which the most pressing issue on a daily basis is where you’re going to order on DoorDash and what bar you’re going to drink at on Thursday night. In a sense this is just fantasy at scale: Protracted playtime, the abandonment of responsibility and good sense in favor of something considerably more juvenile.

You can’t keep that sort of life up forever, or at least not in a way that’s fulfilling and gratifying. The hard part is that the younger people building this sort of life for themselves will wake up one day to find that, like the Galactic Starcruiser, it’s all a major downer, depressing and really quite embarrassing—and yet by that point it will be too late, the years will have fled, the chance to build a solid foundation and an enduring structure will have vanished. The costs of those missed opportunities will be considerably higher than $5,000 and an awkward weekend. It is not hard to reach out and grasp a happy life; we can do it with relatively little practical effort. Disney, in its generosity, spent a billion bucks to show us in an abstruse way precisely how not to go about doing it.