Halcyon Daze will take another look at Disney's Star Wars hotel

Following the story of Disney's now-notorious galactic failure, the new documentary Halcyon Daze hopes to bring viewers back aboard the Galactic Starcruiser.

By Matt Schimkowitz | March 21, 2025 | 12:28pm

Photo courtesy of Halcyon Daze

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Halcyon Daze will take another look at Disney's Star Wars hotel

Among the biggest disappointments in Star Wars history (which is really saying something), Disney’s Galactic Starcruiser never made good on its many promises. From its realistic lightsabers to its flawed RPG mechanics built around scheduling and dysfunctional apps, Disney oversold and under-delivered on the so-called Star Wars hotel. Fans hoped it would push Disney LARPing into a bold new future, and the fictional Corellian star cruiser christened the “Halcyon” was meant to be the centerpiece of Disney’s middling Galaxy’s Edge theme park. Instead, it became a symbol of the company’s hubris. Nothing Disney offered could reasonably justify its immense price. Now, the hotel is destined to become offices for Imagineers to try and create something more beautiful and enchanting than Peter Pan’s Flight, celebrating its 70th anniversary as the best ride at Disneyland.

But we digress. The Galactic Cruiser’s lasting legacy won’t be cosplayers looking to outfox fellow superfans by dressing as Captain Riyola Keevan or Sandro Alimander. It’s the cottage industry of autopsy videos, dissecting the hotel’s failure as a symbol of Disney’s disregard for its customers, taking them for granted while charging exorbitant fees for diminishing returns. Last year, Jenny Nicholson’s expansive YouTube video spent more than four hours exploring every nook and cranny of the hotel’s smooth surfaces, examining the many foibles and few successes of her failed trip to a galaxy far, far away. Yet the Galactic Starcruiser’s massive hype, price point, and failure will undoubtedly inspire others who plunked down nearly $5,000 to ride this hunk of junk to get their money’s worth by making documentaries about their experience.

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To that end, a new documentary will hopefully find the droids and answers fans are looking for. Halcyon Daze: The Final Voyages Of Disney’s Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser is a feature-length documentary taking this decommissioned Correllian star cruiser for one last spin around the cosmos. Already in post-production, Halcyon Daze was filmed, in part, during the third-to-last voyage of the Halcyon and collected over 100 hours of footage, including interviews with former passengers, former cast and crew of the Starcruiser, and internationally recognized experts in interactive storytelling, entertainment, and game design. Halcyon Daze is launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise $50,000 to fund the film’s post-production.

The difference between Halcyon Daze and the other explainers is perspective. Filmmaker Carrie Coaplen seems much less critical of the project than Nicholson and hopes to find the human connection the Star Cruiser fostered.

“Carrie wanted to understand why she was so drawn to a pricey Disney attraction, despite having little interest in Star Wars or the means to splurge,” said Ben Daughtry, Executive Producer, in a statement. “From the moment we arrived, I knew we were onto something special. The Starcruiser was a marvel, but more than that, the deep human connection it fostered was real, tangible, and unexpectedly moving. After the closure, we followed the community as it attempted to rebuild, and that sense of purpose kept growing—in ways we never expected.”