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.
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.”
The restaurant closed down for a year and the end result is a world away from its original incarnation. Welcoming guests to the indoor entrance are costumes of Chewbacca, the furry hero from Star Wars, and the iconic red and blue suit worn by Christopher Reeve in the 1978 blockbuster Superman. More props line the entranceway including Chewbacca’s robotic sidekick R2-D2 and Marilyn Monroe’s dress from 1955 classic The Seven Year Itch.
A high-tech transparent screen is embedded into the cabinets and displays details about the items along with footage of them in the films. It is a discreet and informative touch which continues inside the restaurant. Gone is the clutter of props on cables and instead the memorabilia now lines the walls next to the plush cream chairs. There’s the glitzy red, white and blue outfit worn by Boxer Apollo Creed in Rocky 4 and superhero Deadpool’s sword from the eponymous 2016 movie.
Movie clips and sing-along videos are beamed onto a giant screen on the inside of the sphere and the menu too has been given a makeover courtesy of television chef Guy Fieri. The glitzy exterior has been switched for a steel and grey color scheme and is lined with spotlights which act as a beacon for the restaurant at night.
It fits the new theme of the shopping and dining district which is now known as Disney Springs. The complex wouldn’t look out of place in Beverly Hills with shops inside structures which look more like Mediterranean mansions than a mall. They have cream walls, terracotta tiles on the roofs and fountains in front. It’s all spotlessly clean and packed with little touches like period music playing from hidden speakers and fairy lights lining the palm trees.
“I’m looking to get this restaurant back to being a $50 million store,” says Earl. “The merchandise I’ve got is still under rebuild. The food and beverage business I have already re-built but I want that T-shirt worn with pride again.
“You have got to move forward. I took a celebrity chef in association and that has helped tremendously. The kids can walk round with their phones and get everything that is in the displays.”
The more upmarket style of the Planet Hollywood in Orlando is being rolled out at other restaurants around the world and the brand is partnering on hotels. The first was the 2,500-room Aladdin in Las Vegas which Earl re-branded as a Planet Hollywood Resort and casino and sold to gaming giant Harrah’s in 2010.
The latest Planet Hollywood hotel is opening in India with two more under construction there along with one in Kuala Lumpur. “We are just in the process of a deal for Mexico and the Caribbean and are looking at a hotel site here in Orlando,” says Earl.
“We aren’t doing that many more international restaurants because I’m really into the hotel side which is more of a lifestyle. We have graduated to what we do being a more lifestyle and aspirational brand taking you away from your normal life and trying to give you little bit of entertainment It isn’t about Arnold, Bruce and Sly and an old themed restaurant chain.” It is no exaggeration.
One of the latest Planet Hollywood restaurants opened at Los Angeles’ LAX airport and doesn’t even feature any movie memorabilia. It is a far cry from the early days of the brand and shows it has come so far that it can stand on its own two feet without the need for celebrity endorsement. It has been a roller coaster ride getting there but Earl says he has no regrets.
“If I had a chance to go back there is nothing I would do differently. There would be business decisions, not to do with the brand, that would have been made when we were a public company. At an early stage we would have diversified. Just things like that.
“We over-expanded with the brand too rapidly because of my bad decisions. My reasoning would have been that, just like an internet stock, it had a very high multiple, higher than most internet stocks, and you only support that by growth so the obvious way to grow is to open more restaurants. What we should have done was diversify into other businesses using our skill sets and not grow as much but we are all still here.”
