Chronicling Bob Chapek's Signature Disaster on YouTube
I talk to Jenny Nicholson, whose blistering four-hour saga questions Disney's bet on theme parks. Plus: The downturn is official, and the Ellison moment
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Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of quick(ish) takes on the industry’s passing parade.
This week’s Jamboree playlist:
5 Questions: Jenny Nicholson on a Disney World Disaster
If you work in Hollywood and you’re not familiar with the work of Jenny Nicholson, you should acquaint yourself. She is the gem of the fan-o-sphere. On her YouTube channel, with 1.19 million subscribers, she produces narrated videologues, reviewing in exquisite detail the facets of Hollywood’s latest productions and experiences, with humor and insight that most establishment critics would kill for even an ounce of.
Her latest production, though, is her magnum opus. In March 2022, Nicholson visited Star Wars Galactic Cruiser, the theme hotel with the jaw-droppingly high price point, in the neighborhood of $3,000-$4,000 per person for a two-day visit. The eventual failure of the hotel — it closed its doors in September 2023 — became the signature tin-eared debacle of the Chapek Era (many contenders, of course, for that crown), even as Disney continues to double down on theme parks as its future.
Nicholson spent three years editing the footage of her visit into a video she released last week. It quickly took over the internet, garnering more than 6 million views for the longer-than-either-Avatar film in these past few days.
The four-hour video, titled “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” goes deep inside such issues as the patent for a mysteriously fragile light saber and the naming conventions of Disneyland rides as well as chronicling Nicholson’s ill-starred trip.
Nicholson spoke to us from her home, surrounded by Star Wars dolls and theme park memorabilia, and our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Four hours is almost half the running time of Shoah. What made you feel like this was a topic you had to take on at such monumental length?
It's such an overlap of everything that I'm really interested in — immersive experiences, design, theme park design. I'm also a Star Wars fan. I did a similar video about a park called Evermore, which was also a [live-action role playing] interactive park. Initially I thought that too would just be a travelogue that showed how things went. Only when things went wrong did it become a lot more. In the case of Starcruiser, it closed when I was almost done working on it. So I reworked everything, which again, made it even longer.
Q. What do you think is the essence of what went wrong?
I've thought about it a lot, as you can tell by the extremely long video. The problem wasn't just that, like, one thing was bad.