The Rise and Fall of Planet Hollywood: The Celebrity Restaurant That Lost Billions

Planet Hollywood sold the chance to sit near fame, and fame was the one thing it could never keep in the room. In 1991 Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore opened a movie-prop burger restaurant on West 57th Street in front of thousands of fans, and within five years the company behind it was worth more than three billion dollars on the stock market, earning more than a third of its revenue from T-shirts and souvenirs in dozens of cities around the world. Then the stars stopped showing up, the crowds stopped coming back, and the chain went through two bankruptcies in two years. This is the story of the celebrity restaurant that turned movie stars into owners, and of what is left of it today. In this episode: How a London medieval dinner theater and the Hard Rock Cafe shaped Robert Earl Keith Barish, The Running Man, and the pitch for a Hard Rock Cafe for the movies The 1991 opening night, the movie props on the walls and the Cap'n Crunch chicken Why the black globe T-shirt was the real business The 1996 stock offering, the Official All Star Cafe and the race to sixteen countries Why stars who rarely showed up made every new restaurant weaker The 1999 and 2001 bankruptcies and the partners who walked away The video screens, the hotels and the few dining rooms that survive Subscribe to Faded Favorites for more stories of the American institutions and places a generation grew up with and then lost. #PlanetHollywood #FadedFavorites #RiseAndFall #ArnoldSchwarzenegger #SylvesterStallone #BruceWillis #ThemeRestaurants #90sNostalgia #RobertEarl #BusinessHistory