Cool idea, great writeup!
I don’t think the problem was the building.
Financially, I think the biggest problem was paying an entire cast of actors… AND an entire secondary backup cast backstage already in makeup and ready to swap in at a moment’s notice, because the breakneck pace meant you absolutely couldn’t afford to wait an hour for somebody to drive in.
Like, the limiting factor here isn’t that Disney couldn’t make a building big enough—it was that the whole design of “every guest should get enough face time with an actor character to feel like they’re a protagonist” just doesn’t scale well. Double the seats? Now you need twice the actors for the same amount of interaction, and that ratio means your overhead is going to be thin no matter what.
…I still wanna see somebody do this with a cruise ship, though. Just… if you’re also gonna make it a LARP, you’re gonna have to be more careful about the business implications of your narrative design.
It’s probably way cheaper to get a fiber connection into the middle of nowhere than paying for city houses.
Oh, my sweet summer child. You vastly underestimate the obstacles to rural internet.
Fiber isn’t even close to an option. You might be able to get DSL, if you pay thousands of dollars for them to lay the line yourself. Being restricted to ~128kbps or dial-up is a very real possibility, even in 2024.
The bright side is, if you have one cell provider with good reception (and it will be only one of them that actually works out there), you can tether to a dedicated LTE hotspot for a pretty decent modern-speed connection. But say goodbye to watching Twitch streams live or playing any kind of high-performance low-ping game.