A massive undertaking

Though it matched the Las Vegas outpost in dining room seats - 500, as opposed to the usual 250 - the Downtown Disney location was the first scratch-built as, well, a planet. But that wasn’t all. As something of a herald for the restaurant, a Planet Hollywood Superstore opened on Sunset Boulevard in Disney’s MGM-Studios six months earlier. A little shop for last-minute souvenirs and dinner reservations was situated at the foot of the restaurant’s long stairway. You couldn’t miss it - a Godzilla-sized statue of a Godzilla-homage mascot constantly revolved on the roof. When the West Side was added to Downtown Disney in 1997, another retail store came with it, Planet Hollywood - On Location, in what is now the Star Wars Galactic Outpost.

Like Hard Rock Café four years earlier, Planet Hollywood Orlando immediately became one of the highest earning locations in the chain when it opened on December 18th, 1994. The Disney agreement included plans for future Planets at Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, and the infamously cancelled Disney’s America. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Sylvester Stallone said it as only Sly can: “Mickey Mouse pulled off his ears and put two hamburgers up there.”

Only Disneyland Paris got its own Planet Hollywood. As of this writing, the Disney locations amount for almost 30% of the remaining restaurants.

For four years, Orlando was home to the ultimate Planet Hollywood and the ultimate Hard Rock Café, each an overblown, overpriced treatise on their respective brands as they steamrolled into the ‘90s.

Hard Rock Café was a pub from the day it was born. Dark-stained wood. Dim enough for friendly conspiracy. Loud music and an optimally placed bar. But Hard Rock, at least by Tigrett’s definition, was about more than just the physical. The exterior looked like a cathedral. The two-story dining room featured dueling triptychs of rock royalty in stained glass. The ceiling was adorned with a rotunda fresco straight out of a state courthouse. The Hard Rock Café Orlando was everything Hard Rock Café stood for, writ large.

With a house style established by Batman production designer Anton Furst, Planet Hollywood had no architectural analogue. It was equal parts art deco spaceship, Egyptian temple, and Memphis-print hell. The walls crawled with blown-up cutouts of Hollywood landmarks, demented for effect. Full-size buses and boats and other props big enough to crush a party of four dangled from the starfield ceiling on wires too tiny to spot. Planet Hollywood, at its dizzying height, looked like a museum done up for a Duran Duran music video, forever stuck mid-explosion. It was, in a word, loud, and the Walt Disney World flagship was louder than the rest; a “life-size” Woody, about as tall as the average colonial home, dangled his denim legs over the third floor elevator for 22 years.

Hard Rock Café Orlando didn’t last that long, at least not in its original form.

Encouraged in part by the restaurant’s enduring success, Universal included a plum new location for Hard Rock in the plans for “E-Zone,” the shopping-dining-dancing complex that would turn their lonely park into a resort. Another possible tenant was the Official All Star Café, a sports-themed Planet Hollywood off-shoot developed by Robert Earl in 1995. When Universal announced Shaq’s Place instead, later replaced on the drawing board by Margaritaville when Shaquille O’Neal left the Orlando Magic, All Star was off the table.

Michael Eisner was more than willing to say yes to Earl again. An Official All Star Café opened with Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex in 1997.

A changing world

In 1998, the original Hard Rock Café Orlando closed. Planet Hollywood diversified its empire with its own chain of music-themed restaurants with the help of MTV, a chain of ice cream shops, and Marvel Mania at Universal Studios Hollywood, a non-starter attempt at a chain based on the then-struggling comic book company’s heroes and villains.

In 1999, the new Hard Rock Café Orlando opened at the newly rechristened CityWalk, with its own live music venue attached. The "Kingdom of Rock" had been replaced by the "Colosseum of Rock." Meanwhile, Planet Hollywood filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

In 2000, Disney bought their Official All Star Café outright. Schwarzenegger washed his hands of Planet Hollywood.

In 2001, the third Hard Rock Hotel in the world opened just a boat ride away from the Hard Rock Café Orlando.  Disney’s All Star Café was already the last in business, single-handedly keeping the brand alive for another six years.

At its peak, Planet Hollywood claimed over a hundred locations around the world. There are only seven left, 11 if you count the company’s four resorts. 

Hard Rock Café hasn’t peaked yet, with 185 restaurants, 25 hotels, and 12 casinos to its name.

Is there a lesson among the broken souvenirs and the bloodshed?

Probably. Probably several.

The exact same feverish expansion that scared his Hard Rock colleagues ultimately did Earl in on Planet Hollywood, with an attempted 30-percent year-over-year growth. Not that it slowed him down in the end - Earl remains the CEO of Planet Hollywood International, Inc. and still runs other chains like Buca di Beppo.

In 2018, he teamed with Guy Fieri to launch Chicken Guy!, the restaurant that swallowed Planet Hollywood Orlando’s gift shop.

Saturation had more than a little to do with the theme restaurant apocalypse of the early 2000s. The first Disney Planet Hollywood store to fall was On Location in 2010. The Superstore in Hollywood Studios made it all the way to last year. In the thirty years since the boom and twenty since the bust, theme restaurants have come and gone all over Orlando. NBA City. Nascar Café. Tilman Fertitta, owner of Landry’s Restaurants, laid off all staff without warning right before the first wave of coronavirus closures, leading to continued doubt over the fate of chains like Rainforest Café and T-Rex. Disney’s own collection of misfires - Club Disney, DisneyQuest, ESPN Zone, the fabled David Copperfield restaurant at Hollywood Studios - deserves another article entirely.

Food changed, too.

In the early ‘90s, all it took to sell a $10 cheeseburger was Bruce Willis singing his hit in a Planet Hollywood-branded muscle shirt. Sitting beneath a prop butcher knife incorrectly attributed to Halloween III: Season of the Witch didn’t hurt either. The experience mattered more than anything.

These days authenticity matters. You can’t just serve a Chili’s-grade entrée and expect Christopher Lloyd’s flattened corpse from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to justify an extra thirty percent on the bill.

The solution for Planet Hollywood was a change in menu and change of clothes.

Evolution

In 2016, the big blue asteroid at Downtown Disney disappeared beneath a primer-gray tarp. Inside the newly rebranded Planet Hollywood Observatory, there’s no zebra print to be found. Everything’s chic and antiseptic, like a high-end airport bar - not for nothing, the last Planet Hollywood near Hollywood is inside LAX. No wrecked planes hang from the ceiling anymore. There are fewer props period, but the ones left are presented like Smithsonian exhibits. The massive screen across the cardboard cut-out skyline has been replaced with a wall, no more and no less, where music videos that have nothing to do with movies play endlessly. Guy Fieri personally spruced up the culinary offerings. Reviews have improved since the remodel, even if most of the restaurant's identity was polished off in the process.

As of 2020, only two of the surviving Planet Hollywood restaurants retain their original gonzo style, New York City and Disneyland Paris.

Hard Rock Café hasn’t changed much. Despite the upgrade in venues, it’s still a pub. Still has the stained glass, too. From day one, when two Americans wanted an American burger in Britain and found the name Hard Rock Cafe in the liner notes of a Doors album, it was authentic.

Planet Hollywood Orlando opened with a candy-colored UFO over the front door. Hard Rock Café Orlando opened with the chrome fender of a 50-something Cadillac over theirs.

Movie stars fade, but rock and roll never gets old.

 

Make sure you pay respects to these veterans while you still can. They don’t seem to be in significant danger of extinction, but if the era that inspired restaurants based on everything from professional wrestling to the band Alabama taught us anything, stranger things have happened.