Okay, so, based upon recent news, I had an idea that I figured I'd share. In mid-May, Disney announced that the company would be closing its Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel. One Disney Imagineer speculated that the hotel cost around $350 million to build. Unfortunately, the facility reportedly required a two night minimum stay at a price of $1,200 per day, which limited the number of potential guests who were both willing and able to pay for the experience.
As a kid, I was always more of a Star Trek fan, though I enjoyed Star Wars as well. Like many folks in my age bracket, I enjoyed RedLetterMedia's infamous Plinkett Reviews of the prequel trilogy at least as much as I enjoyed the films themselves. I got increasingly frustrated that the folks running both franchises - as fate would have it, in both cases, that was J.J. Abrams on an intermittent basis - and sort of withdrew. I felt vindicated in 2019, when the sequel trilogy that I'd refused to watch got positively roasted. That followed the late 2016 release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which I saw with my nephews, only to watch the aforementioned crew from RedLetterMedia enunciate all of the regrets that I'd had for the film.
Since then, I've avoided all of the Disney+ content: The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Kenobi, Andor, and whatever else they've churned out. So, when the announcement about the Galactic Starcruiser hotel popped up in the news, I wasn't surprised.
Then, a few weeks later, I saw the advertisement for the Disney Cruise Line's newest ship, Disney Wish, and an idea for making lemonade from lemons struck me: everything that didn't work about the Galactic Starcruiser hotel would be a feature aboard a fully Star Wars-themed cruise ship.
In Star Wars lore, the Mon Calamari cruisers were passenger liners. It would be so simple to work out some kind of Mon Calamari theme, maybe with enemy infiltrators or some sort of quest... All I'm saying is that there are options for a fun, interactive, immersive storyline that would make sense.
Everyone's heard of Celebrity Cruises, right? The Star Trek franchise has proved the concept. It would be simple to do something similar for Star Wars, either by having the actors themselves make appearances, or by incorporating their characters into the storylines. Maybe an aging Lando Calrissian has booked passage aboard the ship, and he's teaching sabacc in one of the ship's lounges, or Wedge Antilles is opening up a flight school and due to disembark at one of the ports. The possibilities, like the ranks of actors who have appeared in one incarnation of Star Wars or another, are endless.
As the franchise continues to churn out new properties, the ship could do themed sailings. For example, if Disney had rolled this out in 2016, a special season of the Rogue One cruise could have been built around specific aspects of that film.
At present, the Galactic Starcruiser hotel is scheduled to continue operating until September. Given the amount of money that Disney has already spent on outfitting the hotel, most of that infrastructure could be fairly easily retrofitted to an existing Disney cruise liner, or possibly to a small- or medium-sized vessel. Of the ships in Disney's cruise liner fleet, only Disney Wish ranks as one of the world's largest cruise ships. In 1994 and 1999, I took two family cruises aboard Royal Caribbean's Viking Serenade. Long since scrapped, Viking Serenade - which weighed in at 26,747 gross tons, literally one tenth the size of that Royal Caribbean's current 236,857 ton behemoth, Wonder of the Seas - would probably be a better fit for the niche audience of Star Wars.
As they say in baseball, "Put me in, coach! I'm ready to play!"
