Is Disney's Star Wars Hotel a ripoff or a marketing masterclass for writers?
Shameless pandering it might be... but the keen-eyed will get a free education in selling to a hungry niche
Star Wars fans have felt let down and left out by the Disneyfication of their favorite sci-fi brand
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Not without justification. The sequel trilogy was uniformly unwatchable.
I give them credit for being able to make three movies where the only thread of continuity was awful.
Still, the clairvoyant mind could have seen this coming.
Disney is a profiteering engine like nothing else on this earth.
As marketing great Dan Kennedy puts it, there's nobody better at separating people from their money and leaving them happy about it.
Which helps make sense of this slice of joy, the "Star Wars Hotel", discussed with no small frustration by The Dark Herald:
Who the hell is this for?
I mean yes, I realize it’s for families with a $400K plus annual income. But who do they expect to come here?
If this had existed when I was a little kid, I would have begged my parents day and night to take me (which would never have happened). When my eldest wasn’t quite old enough for kindergarten she was a huge prequels fan (she refuses to admit such a thing now), so she would have been begging me to go.
But there is no family audience for this thing now.
I can appreciate his frustration. The slowly dying appreciator of the original Star Wars movies inside me is now a terminal case in the ICU awaiting last rites from the local priest.
It's a shame to see a source of joy and excitement slaughtered in the corporate abattoir.
Before going on, I want to clarify an important difference.
The "wokeification" of Disney, like all multinational mega-corporations in The Current Year, is one matter. The blame for the burning wreckage that is the Star Wars brand here in 2021 lays squarely on the creative [sic] team responsible for the recent slate of cinematic agitprop.
Ideological agendas replaced the good old-fashioned fun of pulp storytelling.
This is different from shameless corporate pandering. To Your Host, what appears a cash-grab set up in an overpriced Potemkin village for loaded LARPers holds no appeal to me.
But this is not because of the woke factor.
This is important to keep in your mind as you read on.