Putting A New Spin On Planet Hollywood

Orlando is famous for its extravagant architecture. There are man-made mountains in its theme parks and hotels in the style of seaside mansions from the turn of the century. It’s no mean feat for a restaurant to stand out against this but one that pulls it off is Planet Hollywood.

Famous for having cabinets of movie memorabilia beside the tables, Planet Hollywood was the darling of the hospitality industry in the 1990s. Its restaurant openings were more like movie premières with the launch of Planet Hollywood in London alone estimated to have cost $2 million as stars were flown in from New York on Concorde. There was good reason for them being there.

Planet Hollywood was founded by British hospitality entrepreneur Robert Earl and was backed by A-listers including Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were sitting on a paper goldmine. In 1996 they rang the bells on the Nasdaq to kick off the first day of trading for Planet Hollywood. Then, one of the most frenzied buying sprees in the market’s history propelled its stock in value from $1.9 billion at opening to well over $3 billion in just three hours.

However, as the restaurants’ novelty wore off, repeat business nose-dived. Customer numbers fell by 2% in its first year on the Nasdaq and the following year by 11%. Over expansion sent Planet Hollywood $156 million into debt by 1999 and into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the same year.

In true Hollywood style there was a sequel as the company emerged from the brink only to collapse again in 2001. Earl has re-invented it once again and the flagship of this new orbit is in Orlando.

Earl grew up in England where his mother ran a dress shop whilst his father was a 1950’s-style tenor. After studying at catering college, Earl got his big break. Through his father’s connections he met an entrepreneur named Joe Lewis who is now a Bahamas-based billionaire.

Lewis wanted to find more use for catering halls and Earl helped him turn them into themed restaurants to huge success. As Britain’s Daily Mail recently reported, Earl’s portfolio grew to include hotels and even a 23% stake in Britain’s Everton soccer team which he sold for an estimated $130 million last year. As the Mail revealed Earl has his eye on more soccer teams but Planet Hollywood is front and center on his radar.

In 1983 Earl moved to Orlando and 11 years later he opened the city’s first Planet Hollywood on Disney World’s dining and shopping complex. It is hard to miss.

The restaurant sits inside a huge spherical structure which was originally painted blue and adorned with giant stars. Inside it resembled the props warehouse of a movie studio with cars and model spaceships from movies hanging from the ceiling on cables.

Planet Hollywood

The opening of the new Planet Hollywood Orlando was attended by Robert Earl pictured on the left standing next to actress Reese Witherspoon, Disney Springs VP Keith Bradford and Maribeth Bisienere, ‎Senior Vice President Downtown Disney, ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex and Waterparks

The famous blue and white check dress worn by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz stood in a display case whilst a model of a naked Stallone inside a circular cryogenic tank from 1993 blockbuster Demolition Man hung above it.

The decor reflected the glitz of the era and the concept was way ahead of its time. We all take photos on our phones and post them to social media. The more colourful the content, the better and movie props are hard to beat. Although this tech revolution came after Earl’s restaurant opened in Orlando it wasn’t short of customers.

“In some years it was the highest-grossing restaurant in the world. We had one year where we were $1 million a week, $50 million for the year,” he says. The stars had aligned as Earl had a unique restaurant format and a prominent location in the world’s most-popular theme park complex which last year had an estimated 58.1 million visitors according to industry analysts AECOM and the Themed Entertainment Association.

“I was a very early tenant of Disney and had a 20-odd year tenure,” says Earl adding that several years ago the media giant approached him about signing a new lease and putting a new spin on his restaurant.

Disney’s dining and shopping complex is free to enter (known in the trade as being ‘non-gated) and was originally split into areas with different styles. There was the industrial-looking West Side, the Marketplace with shops in wooden huts to give them a country feel, and Pleasure Island, home to nightclubs and an atmosphere resembling Bourbon Street in New Orleans complete with a nightly fireworks display.

“Disney said, ‘listen Robert, we love you. We would love you to get a new lease, but we are aggregating our different non-gated attractions and it’s about time they had a theme. We have chosen to do a central Florida mining village at the turn of the 20th century and as a result, your futuristic globe looks incongruous. We have an idea and would like to know how you feel about it.’ Walt Disney Imagineering, which is the design team, had done research and found that in America, in the early 1900s, there was a whole splurt of observatories and suggested that as the new theme. I said I love it and $30 plus million later here we are.”