Star Wars Land: How Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge will keep the magic (and profits) flowing.

For Disney, Galaxy’s Edge represents an investment in the future, but it’s also a reflection of something that has been one of the company’s core strengths since it was envisioned by Walt Disney himself.

For most of its history, Disney’s success as a media powerhouse has relied on what company executives and MBA professors have long referred to as “synergies” — complementary businesses that don’t just thrive on their own, but also all work in service of one another. Other companies have of course adopted similar strategies and used their various subsidiaries in this way. But Disney has practically made it into an art form.

The theme parks are one of the most important gears in Disney’s synergy machine. It’s the same basic idea: create or repurpose a story people love, build a deeper connection through an attraction, sell merchandise that lets them take the experience home, maybe create a blockbuster film franchise out of one of the rides, make a ton of cash, repeat.

It’s not just about synergies, though. For a long time, Disney’s media networks division, including ABC, ESPN and the Disney Channel, has been the company’s biggest money maker, but it has come under pressure in recent years. Disney may one day soon need the theme parks to pick up some of the slack.

Of course, for that to happen, they’ll also need fans to embrace a Star Wars story that doesn’t include the Skywalkers.

‘Everything has to feel real’

Smuggler’s Run will also use real-time video rendering technology created by legendary visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, a branch of Lucasfilm. That technology will react to how the guests use the ride’s 200 cockpit controls.

Think of it this way: You could have gone to Disneyland and ridden Peter Pan’s Flight any number of times over the past 64 years — but you could never be Peter Pan. At Galaxy’s Edge, Disney wants you to feel like Han Solo.

And that’s only one of the land’s most innovative rides.

Rise of the Resistance, which will open later this year, is what Trowbridge calls the “biggest attraction we’ve ever built.” Disney hasn’t revealed much about the ride, but we do know it will have multiple ride systems, full-sized AT-AT Walkers and even a John Williams score.

Disney CEO Bob Iger calls the ride “the most technologically advanced and immersive attraction that we have ever imagined.”

“Everything has to feel real,” Trowbridge said. “We want there to be stuff for you to surprise you, to make you feel like you’ve actually walked into this universe of Star Wars.”

From Sleeping Beauty’s Castle to the Millennium Falcon

Disney could’ve just created a Millennium Falcon ride and lines likely would have been hours long. Instead, the company created an entire world with different locales and characters. Rather than touring familiar places like Tatooine or Cloud City, guests will find themselves in Batuu. Instead of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, they’ll find an animatronic version of Hondo Ohnaka, a pirate introduced in the “Star Wars Rebels” animated series, signing park-goers up for Smuggler’s Run.

“There’s a risk that people will get in there and go, ‘Hey, where is Luke Skywalker? Where’s Darth Vader? I want to see that,” said Robert Niles, editor of ThemeParkInsider.com. “If people come away disappointed because they’re not just reflecting an old experience then that could create a bit of a chilling effect on trying to expand the franchise.”

So why not just create a land full of characters and hot spots that fans already know and love?

Well, it’s actually a smart move by Disney to expand the series beyond the family drama of the Skywalkers. Visitors build a stronger connection to the brand when they are front and center as opposed to an observer in this Star Wars universe, Niles said.

“Now, if a Star Wars show comes on Disney+ and the characters say, ‘we’re going to Black Spire Outpost,’ consumers may say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’ve been there before,” he said. “Disney wants to be directly relevant to every consumer, every day.”

Disney not only wants to boost its theme park revenue, Niles said, but also the company wants Galaxy’s Edge to have an effect on other ancillary parts of the company.

“It’s all about, at its heart, Disney positioning itself as a lifestyle brand,” he said. “It is part of your lifestyle so much so that you incorporate Disney in pretty much everything you do, from making Mickey Mouse waffles in the morning to watching Disney+ at night.”

This general idea is nothing new for Disney. The company’s theme parks have long been one of the strongest extensions of Disney’s corporate universe, showcasing its existing intellectual property and serving as a breeding ground for new storylines and characters.

Galaxy’s Edge is also a major investment in the future of Disney’s parks division at a time when that division looks more important to the future of the whole company.

Profits in Disney’s media networks hit a high in 2015, but have since declined 15%, likely due to cord-cutting and rising programming costs, neither of which promise to improve soon.

In that same period, profits for Disney’s parks and resorts have gone up 47%.

“I think Wizarding World encouraged Disney to be as aggressive as they are being with Galaxy’s Edge,” Niles said. “Disney doesn’t want anyone to say, ‘Oh, Universal’s the creative leader in this industry because Harry Potter was so good.'”

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter allowed guests to purchase magic wands for use in the park, drink Butterbeer, the frothy butterscotch-flavored beverage from the series, and ride the Hogwarts Express train. It was a gamechanger in the theme park industry, and Disney didn’t want to be outdone, Niles said.

“With Harry Potter it no longer became acceptable for a top-level attraction just to be a standalone ride in this kind of mildly decorated area. You had to create an experience that brought you into a world from the moment you stepped foot into it,” he said. “So Disney had to create something that was not just their most immersive thing, but the most immersive thing.”

Trip Miller, a Disney shareholder and managing partner at hedge fund Gullane Capital Partners, describes theme parks as the “Rock of Gibraltar” for Disney — safer and more stable than the media side of the business.

“The media side is just so rapidly changing, so whether Galaxy’s Edge turns out really well for them or it’s just kind of a mediocre capex spend, I think there’s very little risk,” he said.

May the Force be with you… Always

We already know what Star Wars is capable of.

Jeff Bock, a senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations, wouldn’t take a guess at how much the brand is now worth to Disney, but said the company “wouldn’t sell ‘Star Wars’ for $25 billion at this point.”

But the franchise is now at an inflection point. Disney would very much like Star Wars to live on past the nine movies that George Lucas envisioned and the family he created. Galaxy’s Edge is a physical manifestation of that hope and its strategy, said Suzanne Scott, an assistant professor at the University of Texas’ Moody College of Communication.

“If Galaxy’s Edge had been set on Tatooine, fans would have enjoyed scrutinizing every detail against its cinematic counterpart,” she said. “In creating Black Spire Outpost, they get all the appeal and familiarity of a spaceport/border planet, plus all of the creative freedom.”

That creative freedom allows Disney and Trowbridge to do more than just create a new world for Star War fans to enjoy — the land also presents a stepping off point for all kinds of new Star Wars experiences, memories, stories and, of course, profits too.

“We have so many stories we want to tell,” Trowbridge told me as we sat looking around Galaxy’s Edge. “That’s one of the great things about Star Wars. There will never be an end to the number of Star Wars stories that we can tell.”